


The Callers From The Coffin

by marblesharp



Category: Book Thief - Markus Zusak, Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Canon Compliant, Forced Prostitution, Gen, Mild Language, Post-Mockingjay, Pre-Canon, Substance Abuse, Underage Drinking, as told by death, he's getting too old for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-24
Updated: 2012-11-24
Packaged: 2017-11-19 10:45:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 19
Words: 38,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/572423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marblesharp/pseuds/marblesharp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fairly simple story, told by Death, about a drunkard and a telephone that is drawn out for the full explanation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Most of Haymitch's life in the perspective of Death, or the narrator of _The Book Thief_. I own nothing. There are spoilers for both _The Hunger Games_ series and _The Book Thief_ here.

Over the years of the monotony of my job, I have come across collectibles that keep me in check, exposing the most repulsive and the most beautiful extents of the human race so I can’t decide whether I appreciate or loathe humanity. I’m caught somewhere between both, and these relics remind me why.

Humans and I have an aching, dreadful relationship, you see. I hate them, I love them, I am haunted by them.

* * * A SMALL NUMBER COMPARED TO ETERNITY * * *

I have exactly

seven reasons

why I view

the human race

the way I do.

Always in my hands or my pockets, slowly being eroded from time and my travels, are seven recorded treasures that show both the compassion and the cruelty of human beings.

I surprise myself by always trying to figure them out. I never give up because I have eternity with the mortal bastards. Often I believe I almost understand them until they pull something so evil, so stupid, that I am left confused at their malevolence once again. They are quite the comedians, jeering at my frustration while they still cannot escape me at the end of their lives.

Liesel Meminger's story is one in a small handful that I have told already. She lived in Germany, in the time of burning books and Nazis. I encountered her three times throughout her life before I collected her light soul.

She stole books - Liesel Meminger, the book thief. A lemon-haired boy, whose dead lips Liesel kissed under a homecooked red sky, gave her the epithet.

That story is one in seven.

Another is in the ruins of a country across an ocean from Germany, Europe, three hundred or so years later. Panem, it was called. I thought I was everywhere during 1942, behind the scenes of Liesel's book thieving career. But then there was Panem.

* * * MY PANEM CALENDAR * * *

First, a war between thirteen districts

and its controlling city, the Capitol.

Next, the Hunger Games.

Lastly, another war.

There were two rebellions, and a compromise for the first uprising that had failed. While human behavior since the beginning of time can very well be blamed, the sole impetus of everything in this story was that compromise.

Every summer, for seventy-five years, I would leave twelve poverty-stricken districts where I spent most of my time. When I'd steal away with the mewling colors and diseased, starving souls, the rest grudgingly returned to working, to living. They often called for me to hurry up and end their misery, but once I was there only some welcomed me. Others were taken by surprise.

Under the dome of a force field, I would gather twenty-three out of twenty-four souls while hovercraft collected their bodies and jubilant trumpets sounded through the ears of the one bastard left surviving.

Tributes were the contestants, aged from twelve to eighteen.

Victors were the tributes without the good sense to die.

I present to you the Hunger Games.

It was humanity at its ugliest. Adults solving their problems using children were human. Make no mistake about it; they were very human.

In Panem, everyone felt trapped in an arena, isolated from the other districts as well as the rest of the world, constantly watched. But a select number of teenagers witnessed that paranoia in its actuality, and before the slaughter they all wondered if anyone would share their disillusionment enough to react if they said _none of this was fair, none of this helped solve anything_.

Haymitch Abernathy knew no one would care and still spoke up, yet his existence said more than any words he'd ever utter.

Similar to our Liesel Meminger, Haymitch Abernathy had a life of beauty marred by brutality. Or was it the inverse?

Although I had brushed shoulders with her before, I found the life of Liesel in a black book she had left amidst the mountain ranges of rubble.

I, using a pen and paper borrowed from his desk drawers, recorded Haymitch Abernathy's life because no one else could. It had to be preserved. I had to remember every detail, every instant I met him. Haymitch was in my dark presence so often that I foolishly kept an eye out for him while I was everywhere else snatching the souls of the dead. The encounters I did not witness I stitched together from his final visions that proved to be useful.

I wonder how many stories like his or Liesel's remain untold because no one else thought to remember them. Laziness and apathy were his apparent excuses, maybe even diffidence, but knowing Haymitch I am certain that was not the reason.

So, here you go: The Callers from the Coffin. Titled by yours truly.

It's a simple story, really, not unlike The Book Thief. But it's something.

If you let me, I'll tell you his story.

* * * FEATURING * * *

A virulent boy

Some psychosomatic ice

A telephone

A game of chess

A flock of mutant flamingos

A reverse skywatcher

A girl on fire

And quite a lot of alcohol


	2. The Study

A telephone attached to a wall in the study greeted them as they explored their new house. It was black as coal, and the shiny spiral wire connecting the phone to the box hung down like a forgotten, unfinished noose.

Surrounding the telephone were long shelves overstuffed with books they'll never read and a desk already equipped with pens and sheets of paper. Big, ornamented chairs were strewn about the study, each one costing more than the new inhabitants' previous abode.

A gaunt, dark-haired little boy unlatched the phone by reaching up on his tiptoes. "Hello? Hello?" he shouted into the transmitter. "Is anybody there?"

The droning dial tone ignored him.

A middle-aged man heaved a box onto the desk. "You have to dial a number first, then wait for the other person to pick up," he explained patiently. His voice was hoarse, like he had just caught his breath after a coughing fit.

"How do you know that?" asked the boy.

* * * AN AMUSING IMAGE * * *

A boy talking to a man next to him

with a phone still pressed to the side of his face

as his hot breath fogged up the porous plastic.

"We use them in the mines," said the man, crossing his sallow arms on top of the box. They used to be a deep olive but all the years in the coal mines had stolen much sunlight from him. "But they're not nearly as good as that one. Put it back."

The child obeyed. The phone was clicking into place when he called out, "Hey, Mitchie! Come check out this room." He scampered over to the desk and sifted through drawers for something to draw on. He told the man he wanted to make a homecoming card for his brother, a task he had not gotten around to as he had been too busy being interviewed by _the weird bird people_ \- never had I heard a more accurate description - and watching said brother fight for his life on the grainy television screen. That last part was omitted, but it went without saying.

A frowning teenage boy sauntered in. Winding black cords sprung from Haymitch Abernathy's head and live-wire sparks lit his eyes, which scanned the study distastefully. I swear our eyes met for a fleeting moment that early afternoon in late summer. Haymitch had escaped me so many times, I'm certain he could detect my deathly presence even then.

In the beginning of his life after his Hunger Games - or his second life, as the victors crudely referred to it - he resembled his former self in every way except the missing scars and the sad, aged gaze. But he was still so young, only sixteen. Similar to other victors he would later befriend and befiend, he possessed an elderly soul far past normal human span.

Without much exasperation, Haymitch told him, "Don't call me Haymitchy. It's surprisingly worse than Haybabe."

The boy laughed, his matching eyes beaming up at his older brother as he corrected him. "No, no! _Hey_ , as in hi, and then _Mitchie_ \- hey, Mitchie."

"Whatever." Haymitch rolled his eyes. His name was prone to inadvertences like that, unfortunately for him, fortunately for everyone else. He was certain the midwife heavily drugged his mother when she had him because nobody could think of a name like his lucid. While they couldn't afford some strong Capitol medicine like morphling, well, sleep syrup was one hell of a drug.

Cory got off easy with his name. The only sobriquet Haymitch and his former neighbor Hazelle Monalow could think of was Cory-Rory, which was made out of endearment rather than to shorten his already brief name. He could have been Cor, but that sounded like apple core, and Haymitch did not want his brother nicknamed after eaten fruit, especially since apples were a luxury saved for gracious paydays or furtive fence crossings on summer mornings by Haymitch.

Interestingly enough, Cory was born and named before Coriolanus Snow was appointed president. The similar first few syllables were not lost on the Abernathy family, and they teasingly cursed their luck on timing.

Haymitch addressed the man, "So Mother told me you weren't moving in with us. What gives?"

"Figured you two would be sick of me by now," he replied. "I can't say the feeling isn't mutual."

"Uncle Sear!" Cory squealed, his grin betraying the indignant outburst.

Sear smirked and gave his older nephew a serious answer. "I still have to work, you know. I'll probably outlive you anyway, boy, so your victory income won't do me any good once you're gone."

"Please. You've got, what, twenty years on me? Besides, I think I've already proven I can survive anything," Haymitch retorted insolently despite an uneasy shudder scolding him. He did not talk about his Quell unless there were cameras and flashing bulbs, but even then he was vague. The Hunger Games weren't exactly what he liked to discuss with his family, or anyone, especially since he just won them.

A woman in her thirties hurried in, her bony hands untangling a black braid. "What are you two arguing about now?" She tried to say it sternly but it was such an ordinary occurrence between her son and her brother who were _too damn similar for their own good_ that she didn't worry anymore.

What she did worry about was said oldest son's droopy raccoon eyes. She would know why they were ringed later that night. She would stay with him during nightmares of the arena, and hold him tightly while he thrashed and wailed.

She would do this for twelve nights. He returned from the Capitol that morning, and thirteen days from his homecoming, his mother would no longer worry. She would be in my arms then.

* * * OTHER FACTS ABOUT RAYAN ABERNATHY * * *

She married young.

She worked as a collier after graduating school

and as a housemaid after childbirth.

She had been pregnant three times,

the first and last attempts

named Haymitch and Cory.

She died looking at Haymitch.

Haymitch smiled at her, and whether it was an empty or knowing smile depended on the observer.

Sear began to speak but Cory interrupted him by blurting out, "Who loves me most!" He dashed around the desk and clung to the waist of his brother, who stood rigid as he had not gotten used to an unthreatening touch yet.

"What are you, six?" Sear scoffed, lifting the folds up from the cardboard box.

"Ten."

" _Clearly,_ I love you the most, Cory-Rory," affirmed Haymitch, sarcastically, turning him away from their uncle in a show of mock protection. The boy smiled around Haymitch's hip at the adults.

Rolling his eyes, Uncle Sear pulled out from the box the first item on top.

* * * THE FIRST ITEM * * *

A faded photo.

In the frame was Colton Abernathy, who I knew suffocated in the coal mines. I was there. I excavated his soul, patted his back while he choked and sputtered. He and his crew members rode on my shoulders as I exited the mine. A silent canary was said to be the culprit.

In their new house, given to them by the Capitol, the study had fallen eerily quiet, leaving the walls to ask in creaking whispers what a picture of a dead man could mean to them. No one had the heart to answer, and the unspoken reminiscing was killing them - the walls, I mean.

Only a few miles away was the Seam, District Twelve's dingy neighborhood set aside for miners, filled with squat, coal dust-encrusted houses and memories too intimate for a mansion in the Victors' Village. It was their home.

Haymitch's real home wasn't the blanched clapboard house he lived in before his Quell. His home was several streets down, deeper within the Seam in an even smaller clapboard house. He, his mother, and Cory moved in with Sear after his father died. As a crew captain, Haymitch's uncle could provide more and took them in willingly, but not enthusiastically.

His sister's husband had died. What was Uncle Sear supposed to do?

Abandon them?

After placing the picture on the desk, Sear turned to his sister with reverence in his creased, steely gray eyes. "Rayan, I can help you with the boys' rooms."

"Already did that. Just unpack that and you're done. But thank you." Her words were clipped gunshots. Needless to say, she wanted what little belongings they had set out, over and done with. She also wished her husband would _stop smiling at her_ from the desk. The photo reminded them that they didn't belong among the big, furnished rooms as well.

Uncle Sear shrugged, continued unpacking. Resigning Haymitch from his self-appointed human shield duty, Cory helped his uncle by standing next to him and watching attentively.

Haymitch and Rayan left the study to escape a dead man's kind glare.

On his way out, Haymitch glanced at the phone and wondered haughtily if they would ever use it. Everyone he knew was there with him or too poor to own a phone.

The telephone waited, unused at the moment.


	3. A Sideways Kiss

A Seam girl skimmed her fingers along the spines of books, the coal dust and grime wedged under her fingernails resembling dark crescents. At every bump, the titles boasted their prices, and she marveled at how no one in that house would mind if she damaged something so expensive.

* * * SHEEPISH MUSINGS FROM A POOR GIRL * * *

Not that she would.

It was just a peculiar thought.

She was just about to slide one out and flip through the immaculate pages with her filthy hands, breaking my promise that no one would ever read in that study, when Haymitch spoke up, jolting her.

"There's nothing interesting," he drawled, slouched back in his chair with white sock feet up on the desk, unimpressed with his warm house and nice furniture, "just Capitol stuff."

"They couldn't provide you with bedtime stories?" She pretended to pout. "How else are we going to get you to fall asleep?"

He answered her with a humorless smile, exhaustion sagging his eyes. He hadn't slept peacefully in a long time.

The night before his fifth and last reaping, he was restless and crawled into his mother's bed, the mattress creaking in the quiet an hour before dawn. After being reaped the next afternoon, he had been too worried to sleep since he was thinking about the arena, how he would be _dead_ if he did not fight hard enough.

He blacked out rather than slept in the arena yet awoke to real terrors, instead.

After undergoing numerous surgeries that repaired his injuries and erased all visible scars, his mentor denied him morphling beyond his recuperation so Haymitch still could not rest painlessly, even after winning the Hunger Games.

In his new house – he didn't call it _home_ – in the Victors' Village, he gave up on the hope of dreamless slumber. Half the night his dreams terrified him, and the other half was spent being calmed down by whichever woken relative reached his bedroom first. He preferred his brother's company since Cory was usually the main object of torture in his dreams, being torn apart by bloodthirsty squirrels in a serene forest. Sometimes he and Cory tried to save Maysilee Donner before she chucked a rock over a cliff and flung herself after it. Unlike the fateful ax that had delivered the final kill to the District One tribute in the Fiftieth Hunger Games, she never came back up but burst on the craggy bottom. Most nights he relived the pink birds spearing her pale throat - her actual death. Every night he screamed his throat raw.

The family understood from experience, and in the form of a young, curly-haired boy, the Seam girl had been informed.

The girl was Mollie Hannigan. I did not know her as Mollie Hannigan until her interviews with the Capitol reporters during Haymitch's Games. She played along as the girlfriend of a tribute, answering their questions honestly and smiling when she was supposed to. I listened alongside Panem as I lurked through the deceivingly beautiful arena, accumulating its plethora of tributes as soon as their canons fired. The audience and I needed to know when they were dead.

I saw her often enough to know her face, though. Like Haymitch, I was often near her. At her birth, her mother died. During a rough winter, her frozen sister shambled into my arms from the far side of the bed. On New Year's Eve, her cousin was robbed on the way to the bakery, his pockets heavy with saved money to buy something celebratory. It was an accidental death but there are no exceptions in my line of work.

At sixteen years of age, she was slight and pretty and had an underdeveloped, lopsided chest. Like the Abernathys, she owned the Seam look: dark hair, gray eyes, and olive-toned skin. Her forehead was dotted with pimples during her conversation with Haymitch, and unlike him, she never had scabs from scratching at them.

Mollie Hannigan had frowned a little at her boyfriend's face upon reuniting, the lost acne scars upsetting her. She thought it was makeup that made him look so flawless in his victory interview. No one had said anything because there wasn't much to say.

It paled in comparison to his reruns on the television in the next room. The couple overheard Rayan Abernathy's recorded interview, then suddenly the commentary while Haymitch clutched a dying Maysilee Donner's bloodied hand bled through the walls. Following a frantic ' _Shit'_ , they heard Cory rush to shut it off.

Haymitch sighed. "I don't want to go tonight, Mollie."

* * * TONIGHT * * *

The feast that he, his mentor Stephan Hendricks,

the Head Peacekeeper, the mayor, and other

high-ranking officials in Twelve would

attend to congratulate Haymitch on his victory

using really good food.

"Too bad," Mollie said, lifting a scrawny thigh onto the arm of the chair Haymitch slovenly occupied. "I mean, I could take your place. Tuck my hair into a cap and square my shoulders, glare, eat like a savage. I think I could pull it off."

Haymitch raised a dark brow at her. "Why do you want to go?"

"Well, I figure I should use you while I've still got you." She patted her sunken stomach deep into her shirt and explained, "You have the rest of your life to eat whereas I'm back to starving with my father once you find yourself a pretty, curvy Capitol woman. He's barely earning enough to scrape us by, and serving soup for Sae only pays so much…"

"Oh, shut up," he told her, admirably ignoring her knee that dug into his side. "I've shared my school lunches with you for years and you know I've never had a problem with that. How's this any different?"

"Because I was your girlfriend, and now you can do better," countered Mollie, shrugging, glad his eyes were bright again even if it was with annoyance. "If you were to cast me away like dirty bathwater, I'd get nothing."

"You're not bathwater."

"That's your answer?"

Haymitch realized that she was trying to distract him, and was grateful for it, and for her, but that did not make him any less agitated. "You won't starve, and I won't be the one that leaves. That choice is yours and only yours, sweetheart."

"I doubt it, Mister Quarter Quell. Just think – you'll be _twice_ as popular than the other victors!"

"Mollie."

"Too dark? I'm sorry," she said, running a hand through his unruly curls after yanking his shoulder back so he was leaning against the seat.

"You're fine. Just stop trying to comfort me at your expense," he mumbled in reply, his head falling against her. After a moment of comfortable silence, he smirked. "It wouldn't be a Capitol woman, anyway. Working with Maysilee, I might convert to preferring Town girls."

Mollie snickered, trusting there was no truth in his words. "I can see why: blonde hair, blue eyes, boobs, rich. Well, richer than us - no, wait, not you, anymore. They're richer than me."

"More like you're poorer than them, but okay."

She backhanded his temple without much force but he still flinched.

* * * ANOTHER APOLOGY FROM MOLLIE HANNIGAN * * *

A long, sideways kiss.

It had been three days since the morning he returned from the Capitol. I visited Haymitch for weeks after his Hunger Games. So much happened, so much death.

The prostrated young man hugging his intestines while cameras and dead tributes surrounded him from all angles was just at the beginning. But that was the climactic finale of the Second Quarter Quell, with twice as many tributes and twice the carnage. Me times two.

There were more losses ten days after that sideways kiss.


	4. Capitol Punishment

Adam Bluet had the cerulean eyes and ashen hair of a Town boy, but something in his loose grin, the way those eyes danced at an opportunity for adventure in the form of a girl or a Hob brawl, made him something of an honorary Seam kid. He went through with every dare and couldn't crack a good dirty joke to save his life. It was a common belief in District Twelve that the oldest Abernathy boy had corrupted him.

He was the butcher's son, well off, and Haymitch's good friend.

I had never met him before he came crashing through the Victors' Village towards the Abernathy household. He sprinted frantically, arms not set but flailing outwards, his heels kicking up so hard they threatened to bruise his ass lavender. It was an amusing first impression regardless of the situation.

I never had the chance to see that grin. Everything I know besides that he was a spastic runner came years after his dash through the neighborhood of mostly empty mansions, from Haymitch's liquor-coated lips to the patient ears of Twelve's next victors.

Not even considering, considering knocking, Adam burst into the foyer halfway through shouting his friend's name. "-ITCH!" he roared. "HAYMITCH! HAYMITCH!"

Roused from the bed he was supposed to be tidying, Haymitch flew into the hallway and called, "What is it?" down to his friend, his words leaning over the railing. They collected and plummeted like water, dripping onto the face below. His hair was tousled, his bright eyes were focused, and his muscles were taut with vigilance. Even after weeks, some part of him was still in the arena.

Haymitch was about to ask again what was wrong but with one look at Adam's unsettled face, he bounded down the stairs and pushed him out the door.

They ran. I followed, enthralled.

They were leaving the Victors' Village when the boy was executed. I was carrying Cory in my arms when they made it to the Square. He was soft and cool and so very small with lightness all children possess. I covered the puncture in his chest with my hand.

The color of the sky was his new shirt, orange-red plaid.

Adam's boots and Haymitch's bare feet smacked the cobblestone road as several gunshots rang out. Adam faltered but kept up with Haymitch while he shoved through the crowd.

Mollie tried fighting me when I came for her, thinking I was one of the Peacekeepers who had forced her to her knees. I took her hand and helped her up off the ground. She brushed cinders off her dress. She wanted to say goodbye to her father but he was still unconscious on their kitchen floor. They'd reunite one day, anyway.

Recognizing the face of their victor, people made way for the two boys - not because of Haymitch's status, but because _it was all his fault._ Their faces ranged from fear to sadness to pity to anger.

Tightly ringed around the inner circle of the horde were the crisp white uniforms of Peacekeepers, who stood armed and soldierly yet avoided Haymitch's confused scowl as he stalked towards them. Over their shoulders he saw the Head Peacekeeper Drusus with four other officers, two of which were holding a disheveled, ululating Rayan Abernathy by her arms.

* * * THE NEXT DISCOVERY * * *

Two bodies sprawled out on the cobblestone:

one in a bloodied white sundress,

the other in a buttoned plaid shirt.

A scream ripped from the sixteen-year-old boy as he clawed his way through the line of Peacekeepers and tried to reach his mother.

She had already seen him, had just wrenched away from her captors, sobbing something resembling his name, when three staccato shots pierced the summer air. Rayan crumpled to the ground.

From my place beside Adam on the fringe of the crowd, I saw the image of despair from behind.

* * * DESPAIR * * *

A boy's outstretched hand reaching towards

a stumbling dead woman whose

eyes were still glued to him,

behind her a man with a raised gun.

Stunned, Haymitch jerked his arm back, his gaze falling on his dead mother a few meters away and then climbing to the gun barrel and the Head Peacekeeper attached to it.

With nothing to lose even though he had not fully registered Mollie and Cory, he lunged for Drusus, knocking back an unprepared Peacekeeper along the way while more from the ring converged onto him. He managed to scratch Drusus down the forehead and neck before the Head Peacekeeper tried firing his gun. Later, Haymitch found out the Peacekeepers had strict orders not to kill him. Once he got hold of the weapon, he flung it sideways into the crowd. It skittered across the cobblestone, coming to a rest at the feet of a lady named Sae.

Surrounded by white, Haymitch went feral, kicking, punching, clawing, swearing. By then I assumed I would resume my job, collecting more battered souls from the middle of Town Square, between the gallows and the stocks where the bystanders had begun to disperse. I already had three looped in my arms.

At some point his punching evolved into waving his bleeding, bruised fists at Peacekeepers who had regrouped and carried him away from the corpses. Anguished moans replaced his screams.

After the Peacekeepers dumped him on the ground, weapons trained on him, a handful of kids stepped up. Their parents were still in the mines, as it was barely time to clock out. But they had seen enough floggings to know how to react, what to do with the whimpering pile of human on the ground.

While he was not flogged for attacking the officers, his friends saw, as did I, the lashes on the boy. They were the worst ones, the undetectable mental wounds. Crisscrossing his back and torso and swelling angrily across his face, the dripping red lines on his olive skin almost resembled orange-red plaid.

As I compared Haymitch's lacerated body to the sky above, Rohan Hawthorne hoisted him to his feet and led him to the nearest building. The baker, a young lad who had just taken over the family business after his parents' retirement, held the door open reluctantly. Rohan was tall and strong - and he hunted illegally.

Rohan I've met. He, Haymitch, and another boy, Artie Everdeen, often stood by several dying criminals fresh from the whipping posts in the apothecary. Many times the young woman working with her parents could do nothing except open the door for me, let me in. Haymitch would then promptly shut it while Rohan closed the curtains and Artie gave the apothecary illegally obtained herbs as payment.

I both admire and pity people like her, healers who try their best to prolong the inescapable. She was at most seventeen years old and had already seen more starvation, more poverty sagging the puny shoulders of children than most doctors in their entire career. Yet she did not assist Haymitch that night, for he could not be healed with herbal remedies, but was part of the horde that scattered as soon as the Peacekeepers moved in.

Those children of District Twelve were used to helping criminals.

That night they had a victor to save.

*

I am in many places at once. As I lifted a malnourished girl off against a wall in District Nine and held another soul's hand as we ran across the street in Three, I entered the bakery in District Twelve with Adam Bluet.

The Peacekeepers and corpses behind us were silent. The multitude of witnesses had already hidden.

These execution attendees - Sae, among them - somehow forgot that word was supposed to get around fast in Twelve; the guiltless executions remained unspoken for many years. Almost three decades later, Sae would recall the incident to two children who were on fire, and with the knowledge already, they'd wait for Haymitch to slowly recount the wretched night to them himself.

But I am leaping ahead. I am trying to tell this story in chronological order, but my knowledge of events in the past explains events in the more recent past. Yes, this story happened a great while ago.

Ignoring the chair offered to him, Haymitch sat himself down on the tiled floor with a small creak. As if that was too arduous, after he told Rohan Hawthorne to get his mentor, he laid down on the floor. It was cool against his flushed face. Hot tears sizzled on the cold linoleum.

Where was the strong, arrogant young man in the Capitol interviews towards the end of his first life? Who was that shattered boy on the checkered tiles?

Above him, Adam Bluet, Artie Everdeen, Hazelle Monalow, and Nolan Trumble discussed what to do with him. They knew he was there, but he wasn't. He could hear, but he wasn't listening.

The young baker stood sheepishly in front of the counter, constantly looking out the cake display windows at the Peacekeepers and hoping they wouldn't barge into the place.

"They didn't arrest him so we must be safe for now," Artie said with at his checkmated friend, distrustful of his sanity.

" _We're_ safe? His family is out there dead!" That was Hazelle. By her words, I was not sure whom she was more concerned about: herself or Haymitch. She was human either way.

Artie pointed out something I had noticed earlier. "We haven't seen Sear yet. He's still working."

"Should we hide him in here when he clocks out?" suggested Nolan. Everything about him looked hungry. His eyes kept peeling away from the bakery displays and his dry, creased mouth was set between sunken cheeks.

Artie shook his head, as did the baker, but Adam offered, "I'll take him in. And Haymitch, too, if him staying here is dangerous." At the last part, he nodded sympathetically to the baker. "Barm, you look more nervous than Roger Cartwright in the gym class showers."

"I just…" the baker started, his blue eyes fearful.

"We'll leave once Mister Hendricks gets here, don't you worry," Artie assured him.

I had stayed close to the door the entire time, not planning on leaving until I saw Haymitch get up. Cory kept asking about him.

My job is to deliver souls to the conveyor belt to eternity but hurrying is not required. I have all the time in the world. So I kept my three District Twelve souls close with the other recent varieties from all around Panem.

I stayed to watch the game.

The sun had melted into the dark green mountaintops when Stephan Hendricks arrived at the scene of the murders. Through the bakery window, I saw Haymitch's mentor's pale face contort with the emotions of the crowd before. Fear subsided quickly, and sadness and pity were saved for later, but anger was present as he stormed over to Drusus.

I did not hear their words until they featured in both their final visions, for different reasons. For Stephan, it was a moment of insurgence, where he put aside what was lawful for what was right. For Drusus, it was the only time he questioned the two, and his incertitude would end badly for him.

* * * A BRIEF EXCHANGE BETWEEN VICTOR AND HEAD PEACEKEEPER * * *

"What the hell is the meaning of this?"

"Look, orders are orders. I have

no idea what this—"

"Where's the boy?"

Drusus directed him toward the bakery. As he started towards it, Stephan said more to Drusus about the bodies still curled on the ground. "Don't cart them off yet. I think a proper goodbye is in need."

A look of remorse smacked Drusus across his rectangular face, leaving a confused sting. Like he had said, _orders were orders._ Why should he feel guilty about that?

Stephan Hendricks thanked the teenagers in the bakery and then apologized to them. "You need to get home; there might be consequences for your helping out. I don't want you all involved in this any longer."

Artie growled, "But what's _this_?"

"It's my punishment."

Everyone turned to the young man sitting up from the chessboard.

Tears still lined his face but he was no longer crying. "For what I did in the arena, that stunt with the force field," he choked miserably. "Don't you see? I did this."

I was expecting one of Haymitch's friends to rush over, crouch beside him, and murmur lies, yet it was Stephan who filled that role - the role of someone who cared. While his mentor repeated how _it was okay_ , the others in the store had faces and hearts of stone.

Glancing at the squadron outside, Hazelle asked, "Where's Rohan?"

"I sent him home," Stephan brusquely answered between lies.

"Then we should leave, too," Hazelle concluded, tossing a detached expression to the other Seam kids. Nolan and Artie nodded quietly.

While the deserters disappeared into the Seam, Adam caught Barm Mellark noticing his conflicted expression and glared him behind the counter.

They were all about eye contact in District Twelve. Perhaps their accent was too nasally to be threatening whereas a good, twisted scowl effectively conveyed they meant business.

In an earnest, pragmatic voice, Haymitch addressed Adam. "You don't have to stay. Stephan is right, you'll only get in more trouble."

His Town friend sighed impatiently. "You do know they left you for good, don't you? No one's going to want to be around you if…"

"If it means becoming a target. Yeah, I got it. Now go."

Gray and blue eyes fought it out, and in the end cerulean fell to the tiles. Gray won.

"Really, I'm willing to stay."

"Go."

Whatever victory there was in winning a glaring contest, Haymitch did revel watching his friend leave the bakery. Instead, "They're still…" His lips kept moving but not even hot breath left his strained throat.

Stephan followed his longing gaze out the cake display windows and explained, "I thought you should get the chance to say goodbye."

*

The sky was lavender, and Haymitch Abernathy was numb.

The color of the sky summoned to me one of his final visions. The bloodied plaid sky from before was muted in his memory of the executions, but I had witnessed that color myself. The twilight matched a color from about three months before. I would not recognize the hue until Haymitch Abernathy was dying.

He might have remembered that same colored sky during the walk from the bakery towards the corpses, though it might have been too painful. I don't believe he was thinking at all in that moment, anyway. The memories came later.

Yes, it was a deep, bruised lavender.

On an evening in late spring early summer, the sun was in the process of setting and two teenagers were in the process of climbing.

* * * DOWN AND UP * * *

There was tree climbing,

yet they were fence crawling minutes before.

In the same tree on different branches, a conversation pinpricked the forest.

"Sweetheart, you're _terrible._ "

"Well, if you would just _help me_ …" Mollie Hannigan struggled on a wobbling tree branch. A bag with the scarlet of apples peaking under its flap threatened to slip off her shoulders. She was about three meters down from the sturdy branch where Haymitch was stationed, and already her school uniform jacket sleeve had torn.

Without assistance, Mollie ended up on a branch somewhat below and to the right of his. "There!" She brushed her pant legs with relief. Oh, Mollie. Didn't she know…

"You still have to climb back down," Haymitch pointed out from above. His smirk was in danger of being smacked off, if she could reach it.

Mollie untied and retied her hair, groaning, "You know what? This isn't even worth it."

"Shut up or you'll insult the sun."

" _Excuse me?_ "

"The sun. It's sensitive."

"You are hilarious."

"Shh."

An eye roll from the girl, a mocking grin from the boy: the definition of love, I am certain.

Haymitch kicked his leg over the tree limb and looked out at the sunset. When I regarded the memory, I was not sure why it was smothered. The reason was Mollie Hannigan.

She had swung the wrong leg over her branch and faced the opposite direction. Patches of twilight shone through the leaves. She stretched her neck and, after hanging her bag on a convenient lower branch beside her, lifted herself higher into the tree for a better view. Once she saw more open firmament that grew darker the further away it spread from the west, she settled.

"Oh," she breathed, "look at that blue."

Haymitch snapped, "We're watching the sunset, not normal, boring blue."

She flashed an analogous mocking grin down through the branches at him. "Why do you care so much?"

"Hey, I'm trying to be romantic. Sunsets are romantic and we came for a stinking sunset!"

"I'm looking this way." He did not see her hand but knew which direction it pointed. Mollie was _so damn stubborn,_ and he loved her.

The girl gazed, the boy huffed. He even crossed his arms and glared at the blazing west until his eyes smarted. Haymitch's curiosity gradually rolled up and over to the other side of the expanse. Defeated, he climbed up and sat on the already-drooping tree limb with Mollie, facing the east.

"This thing's going to break and we will fall," he mumbled negatively. Mollie smiled and took his hand that clenched the branch. Her gray eyes remained glassy while her smile faded into a small, triumphant smirk. After a long moment, more grumbling disturbed the twilight. "It's more like a lavender, anyway."

"I love you, Mitchie."

While the moment seemed worthless at the time, a dying man's visions reveal what was significant to him. It might not have been on the list until that same sky, that same color, roofed Mollie's dead body on the cobblestone.

Under a firmament fresh from hauling away the sun, Haymitch Abernathy first stumbled over to the closest body. He knelt beside the empty husk his heart still called _momma_. She looked uncomfortable. He intended to overturn her but ended up awkwardly cradling her in his arms. He might have rocked.

I will keep this as brief as I can. There was unrequited sobbing. There were fingers pressed to trembling lips. There were goodbyes, albeit the premature variety, even though the souls were long dead, long taken by me.

Of course, I left afterwards. It would be sick to stay and watch a broken boy who thought he had won guided back to their empty neighborhood by his mentor. The irony was that I would return. My portable bottle of _why_ was empty.


	5. Hiding From Hell

Humans are evasive with the concept of _hell_. There is the infamous afterlife, and then there is hell on earth.

The former I am not familiar with. I deal with humans when they die. I deliver them, send them away. After that, I do not know what becomes of them.

The latter, however, I am an expert on. Hell requires breaks in duration for it to be excruciating. Unrelenting hell, although it sounds insufferable, can numb humans until they eventually adapt.

* * * I HAVE NO CHOICE * * *

Adapting means accepting,

and occasionally that is

the equivalent of

calling me over.

"Take me."

Fine.

The days, weeks, months, years after the arrests of Haymitch Abernathy's loved ones were dappled with hell. All the ghosts were present, as was I. His hell bringers tormented him at intervals, as if they were issued schedules and ordered not to overlap their haunts. Only once did they all synchronize.

Final farewells said, Stephan Hendricks deposited Haymitch in his room and slept on the couch. He expected a grim night of second-story sobs.

Instead, he awoke to his only returned tribute curled beside him, not under the quilt but with a threadbare pillow from his old Seam bed shoved against his stomach. Haymitch was frowning in his sleep, and his droopy raccoon eyes appeared darker in the pale morning sunlight.

Wrapping the boy in the patched quilt - also from the Seam, made and repaired by Rayan's bony hands - Stephan remained wearily wary. Neither of us knew what to expect out of the boy. He was a time bomb and no one knew when the countdown began. While Haymitch asleep in the dead silent house was better than him awake in reality, waiting out a respite was Stephan's least favorite thing, especially after his Hunger Games.

I was not well acquainted with Stephan until Haymitch's second life. Stephan Hendricks was a victor and not once did I encounter him in the Fourth Hunger Games.

Why was that? Well, the meanest little girl was his neighbor.

* * * CLARIFICATION FOR THAT LAST STATEMENT * * *

I learned from his poisoned, eclipsing visions

that his neighbors had a

bossy youngest daughter

who looked to affable Stephan

to alleviate her boredom.

Her favorite game was hide-and-seek

so they played hide-and-seek.

Roslyn Cartwright was three years younger than Stephan when they were both reaped for me to find.

Stephan was the better hider. He was never a seeker yet somehow he won.

In the comfort of his morphling dazes, Stephan forgot that he had been in the Hunger Games. He would view it more as a serious game of hide-and-seek where he outlasted all the other kids from being found by _It_. I've been called worse.

The syringe needle would temporarily disappear under his eggshell skin that threatened to splinter, and then everything warped, alleviated. Unlike other morphling-addicted victors, the Capitol drug did not consume his thoughts and he went for weeks without an injection. The breaks in living hell kept him alive. He ate enough to make sure his appearance was never emaciated, never reflected how he felt underneath. But when he yearned for it, there was no hesitation.

That, my humans, was the very first thing Haymitch informed his own returned tributes about Stephan Hendricks. What followed were the stories of when he began to understand his mentor and how he ultimately betrayed him.

Haymitch had been infuriated when he was told his mentor denied him morphling for his recovery. The sweet anesthetic would have been _perfect_ to eradicate the pain pulsating throughout his scarless body.

The train ride back to Twelve, however, he found an explanation. It was during a rather aching recap of the Second Quarter Quell when Haymitch uncovered Stephan's motive as he removed the lid of a box of hypodermics. The train seemed to sway despite all its advanced technology, and Haymitch's original purpose for meddling in various rooms became insignificant. Suddenly, the refusal had a reason. The man Haymitch barely knew who had preserved his first life had an outlet for pain that he never wanted to risk Haymitch adopting.

Truth be told, Haymitch's revelation was when he began to admire his mentor and view him as an actual victor. A later series of revelations would result in the very opposite, among other tragedies.

Even if he hadn't at first, the Abernathy family welcomed Stephan after Haymitch returned and the reporters and cameras filtered out of District Twelve's train station. He sat with them during their first dinner in their new house. He was not family to them - and never assumed he would be - but for two weeks Cory smiled up at him and Rayan's eyes thanked him over her son's shoulder while she hugged him.

They had been a family again, and he was partly the reason yet not _a part_ of it.

Somehow Haymitch slept through the first day of being an orphan, also known as his first day of hell. Yes, his Hunger Games were traumatizing and his victory marked the start of his second life, but he had comfort in knowing he was fighting to return home. With no family, why did Haymitch still resist me? He chose to live in hell; it was his own self-punishment.

Boredom combined with mounting anxiety led Stephan to the Abernathy family's study, which was nestled in the back of the house. He wore the universal attitude of _why the hell not?_ since the alternative was to sit still and wait until hell woke up.

He was unfazed as the carpet sprouted spring grass, tall and brittle. Little Roslyn rushed around the meadow that had just materialized but seemed as if it had been there forever. Searching for the right place, any place, to hide, she was slaughtered by an advancing tribute.

The man put a knobby fingertip to a book spine at chin level on a shelf.

Shattering the memory - and it _was_ a memory for his hallucinations were fairly pleasant - as Roslyn's canon rang throughout the prairie that became a study again was a single word, so innocent and gruff and familiar that Stephan knew immediately hell had arrived at last.

* * * THE COUNTDOWN STARTER * * *

"Cory-Rory?"

*

Uncle Sear crossed the lawn of the Abernathy household two days after a morning rainstorm washed blood and pedals - but not the lesson - off the cobblestone in the Square.

How peculiar it was that someone had dropped white rose buds onto the gore only for them to stain.

The owners of the diluted blood were buried in the mud that same afternoon. Sunken into the cool ground were three hastily-made wooden coffins: two medium ones, and a rather tiny one. The attendees were those who spied through their shutters and the homeless gravedigger, whose soul I would soon collect by early winter.

Sear resisted the urge to scream when the _damn door_ did not enable access inside the house.

The rushed knocking reverberated through the house but Stephan doubted the other inhabitant noticed it. After placing his cup of broth on the low table and rising from the settee, he made his way through the quiet house and, painstakingly, up the stairs.

Outside in the very early morning air, Uncle Sear kept cracking his knuckles and glancing over his shoulder at the other mansions.

* * * A DEFINING MOMENT * * *

But he waited.

He was a patient man.

The permanent scowl carved

in his face was misleading.

Stephan padded down the hallway on the second floor so cautiously it was comical. He sighed, relieved, when Cory's bedroom door opened. The last time it had been locked and a howling older brother was on the other side. Stephan Hendricks entered, ignoring any ghostly chill that haunted another human in the house, and peered out the window at the front yard.

Uncle Sear was becoming rather fidgety. He jumped when he heard scuffling from inside the house. It opened and Stephan's pale face ushered him in with a head tilt.

There was a chair by the entry. Before, it was wedged under the locked brass doorknob.

"No judgment," Stephan assured him, "but where have you been?"

Sear replied, "The Bluets took me in. Adam gave his bedroom up and everything."

Despite everything, Stephan's eggshell face cracked into a smile. "I knew he would. I'm sure Alvin and Mot loved that."

"Yeah, well." Sear took a seat and a mug that was offered to him. His calloused hands cupped the warm ceramic. "Besides, waiting a few days until things settled down was the smarter move. There's been a break in the system."

"What do you mean, a break?"

Sear shook his head. "Head Peacekeeper killed himself last night. I heard he pulled the trigger in front of a new recruit, but that's melodramatic Town talk for you," he said with an eye roll and then noticed that Stephan's hair was too white to ever have been Seam dark. "New Head's on the way."

"Let's hope the bastard's better than Drusus," Stephan huffed. "So no one is in charge right now?"

"No, they've got someone temporarily. There aren't many protocols for Head Peacekeeper deaths besides sticking the next in command in charge until a qualified official is sent out."

"Seems a little too organized," Stephan commented, but he found he no longer cared.

"It's Twelve," the collier chuckled bitterly. "What do you expect? They're ordered to stand around and watch innocent people get executed, and they do it without hesitation." His eyes brimmed with sorrow.

Stephan did hesitate. He knew pain as a victor, but he never experienced _that_ pain, the hurt in losing someone too soon. "I'm sorry." As I've observed in the past, those words can feel insincere when directed towards something that could never be stopped.

Sear nodded, not meeting the man's pitying stare or his apology. He cleared his throat. "How is he? They wouldn't let me see him. I wanted to but they told me it wasn't safe and…"

"He's not okay." No sense in lying. Stephan exhaled and continued in a hushed voice, "He finally woke up yesterday afternoon, and it's been hell since."

He knew what hell on earth was as well.

As the old victor recounted to the miner incidents of broken things and distressed sounds, a husk of a teenage boy crept down the stairs. He looked fatigued, tired even though he had slept for ages. His appearance was as feral as when he clawed Drusus, but broken, quiet, and so very tired. I reiterate to emphasize.

"…but when he woke up, he thought they were all still alive and was calling for Cory to get ready for the Reaping because they were late."

The eavesdropper winced. He hovered by the kitchen entryway until he recognized his uncle's deep, raspy sigh.

"Sear." Haymitch did not hesitate to run into his arms, and Sear was squeezing the breathe out of him.


	6. A Game of Chess

"You bastard," Stephan Hendricks chortled, staring at the game board in disbelief while Haymitch leaned back in his seat with a smirk. The old man considered flipping the board over, knocking Haymitch's damn queen to the floor that Stephan's king piece was well acquainted with. Instead, he asked him, "Are you _sure_ you've never played before?"

"Yeah, I'm sure."

"No chess tournaments in the Seam, right?"

"Nope," he replied. "We could never sit still long enough to play something as tedious as chess."

I laughed at that from the staircase, four steps from the bottom. That afternoon was an interlude from the Twelve variety; my service tended to be unneeded when the entire district had enough to eat. Food shipments were packaged and delivered to all citizens before noon. The succor was only temporary since it was Parcel Day, where every month until the next reaping, the victor's district was rewarded for providing a champion.

The first Parcel Day in honor of Haymitch Abernathy was broadcasted on all the televisions, to all the starving humans. It was the Hunger Games, after all.

How many did I take from the other districts while Twelve celebrated? More than I care to remember since it was the same as always, and always was a lot. Always was ordinary.

My presence around Haymitch during the months after his homecoming was rather appropriate. While there were a mere handful of souls darkening where he was within reach following the loss of his loved ones, I was with him.

* * * A CLOSER LOOK * * *

Wherever he went,

spread out and looming above him

like smoke:

me.

I kept coming back to see the chessman.

He believed I haunted him but he haunted me as well.

The week of the second Parcel Day, Haymitch had, reluctantly at first, learned the game of chess. He needed a distraction. Stephan needed someone to play against on his old childhood chess set. He had tried showing him musical chords and scales on his piano but the young man didn't take to them well, as Uncle Sear pointed out one evening after a particularly grueling lesson.

It was no surprise Haymitch took a liking to the game once he understood it past each chessman's controls. To play chess well, one had to think ahead and consider all the possibilities, and that was right up his alley.

Thereafter, it became the game of his second life, the perfect way to visualize his situation and how to respond. So far, he hadn't been responding productively, which was understandable. The president had captured a few of his pawns, and sometimes Haymitch was not certain if he was one himself, but he knew it was his turn next.

As gaunt, dark-haired children traded cans of applesauce for tins of biscuits among the whipping posts and gallows, Haymitch had beaten his mentor for the thirteenth time. It was preparation for the endgame, although that would not be for another twenty some years.

From the food cabinet area of the kitchen, Uncle Sear said something about checkmating as a profession.

"Maybe chess _should_ be my talent," Haymitch half-agreed, half-joked.

Stephan shifted in his chair and grumbled, "Or it could be humiliating your old mentor."

Haymitch shrugged. He started drumming his fingers on the table, inattentive. Stephan had to grasp his fingers, in mid-tap, to get him to focus.

Sear, pretending not to notice his nephew's small lapse, continued talking about talents. "Then again, I thought we'd agreed on dancing."

"Oh, right," Haymitch laughed, the invisible mended scars across his face tearing from the bout of genuine joy. He relaxed his features into the customary mask of indifference, where the self-made stitches were loose and idle as a smirk was the stretching limit. "I'm lousy compared to everyone else," he added with honesty. Poverty and squalidness aside, Twelve was known for valuing music in its culture. Sincere virulence and immodesty aside, Haymitch valued his dance partner - varying in a little brother, a smiling mother, a laughing young lady, or a teasingly ardent friend - more so than the jigs themselves. How could he dance when he had none of those partners anymore?

"You really should figure out your talent soon; the Victory Tour's in a few months," Stephan said. "We already know playing an instrument's out." He suggested reading the list of possible talents sent to him, to which Haymitch scoffed and knocked his knuckles against the underside of the table. His mentor exhaled and ran a hand over his receding white waves. They were high-tide before the executions. Although he suspected the answer, Stephan asked, "How's your singing?"

"Atrocious. My friend Artie can sing, though. We used to-"

"Don't care." The old man thought for a moment. "What about writing? Painting?"

"No to both."

Uncle Sear cut in, addressing Stephan, "Does he really seem like the deep, sensitive type who'd be interested in that stuff?" He was a tortured soul, wasn't he?

"My talent was piano and I'm not sensitive." Stephan's words were piqued.

His young victor was quick to counter. "Like hell, you are!" Softer, as Stephan's face folded, he amended, "Look, um, I'm not really exceptional in anything." He forced a painful, seam-ripping grin. "I'm just myself, and that should be good enough!"

Sear considered his nephew's expression and then asked, "Is lying a talent?"

"No," Stephan said, "but acting is."

Sear winked at his nephew, who groaned, "I am sure as hell _not_ acting."

* * * AN INSIDE JOKE IN THE ABERNATHY FAMILY * * *

Haymitch was forced by his mother to audition for school plays.

Are you laughing or groaning?

Eventually, his mentor and his uncle agreed on a talent for the boy that he had no excuse to reject. Acting was involved, though.

Months later, colorful bird people with winking cameras filmed Haymitch robotically pointing at old, faded blueprints a foreman had smuggled out of a filing cabinet. Throughout the interview for his nephew's supposed mining engineering talent, Sear fed him lines from behind the Capitol reporters. If anyone noticed that the laborious, esoteric job was similar to what he would have done had he not been reaped for the Quarter Quell, they may have understood the message - given there was such a thing.

Haymitch Abernathy was far from the only one to act for the sake of the Hunger Games, in years to come and years that had passed. Though most victors were concerned about their sponsors and talents, some, later on, had a game to finish, to win. Haymitch was just getting started, really.

Questions about how well he and his family had settled into the Victor's Village were pulled from the interview. Supposedly, his mother and brother were both ill with pneumonia, and he and Molly were having some miscommunications that stemmed from a lovers' spat. One reporter assured him that _everything would work out just fine_ and then frantically called Stephan over because Haymitch had bitten through the inside of his cheek.

The pretense at domestic normality would be relinquished as the years passed and people became disinterested in him. However, touring each district and returning to the Capitol, so many personal questions were asked and he would casually reply, "We're all right," lying like a good little victor. Molle Hannigan and Rayan and Cory Abernathy were dead, and he was most certainly not all right.

But then the flamboyant interviewer followed up with another question, an ordinary one to inquire the newest Hunger Games champion. It was not necessary but the audience expected it because they wanted to know.

Why did the director keep reshooting that damn question and his damn answer over and over again?

Why did they keep reapplying makeup to his face?

Why did Haymitch Abernathy break down over a single question?

* * * AN INDIRECT ANSWER FORCED FROM LACERATED LIPS * * *

"Of course I'm happy."

It was that night in the Capitol when Haymitch decided his next move.


	7. Schemes Over Soup

District Twelve's black market originated from a coal warehouse abandoned in the years before the first rebellion against the Capitol. The Hob was not safe for the whole family by any means, but those who knew the right people were tolerated, regardless of who they were or what they were called or how many years they had been alive.

While most Hob peddlers and customers were Seam, social class status was sometimes ignored, as our Adam Bluet had proven. Business was business, and when dealing with Town folk who lacked Seam savvy, business was fairly accessible billfolds in coat pockets.

That was actually how Adam met a certain Seam boy of Abernathy descent, along with his alarmed fist introducing itself to half-flinched gray eyes. Why Adam's father, Alvin Bluet the butcher, entrusted his fourteen-year-old son with buying Hob twine to tie up packages of horsemeat was irrelevant information to Haymitch. The leather wallet smiled at him as it jounced past the soup counter. The pocket was just begging to be picked.

Not long after the attempt, when his maroon bruise faded into a waxy peach color, Haymitch was glad he had not succeeded in extracting the naive Town boy's wallet; Adam made a decent friend and his mother could _cook_.

Due to the events in the weeks following the Second Quarter Quell finale, Adam Bluet never bought from the Hob again. Even the Seam was nothing of value to him anymore since whoever would usually accompany him there were either traitors or fallen chess pieces. He would later leave the butchery to his younger sister and reopen the sweetshop.

The aforementioned chess piece found petty reasons to visit the Hob while his uncle was working during the week. Informed of their customs towards rich people, Stephan Hendricks decided to never step foot in the Hob and stayed in the Victors' Village to play his piano in peace each time Haymitch left.

After I had knelt and scraped a frosted man off a wall of the Hob, I saw dark curls smothered under a winter cap as their owner strode toward me, past me. Shutting out a frigid, cobalt sky with the door, the young victor entered the Hob as he always had in his first life, but his chin that once proudly tilted up in poverty drooped like his pocket of separate coins. Haymitch knew better than to put his money in a billfold. He ducked his head passing some stalls and greeted the peddlers at others, the ones he was so dependent of buying from less than a year earlier.

Haymitch was drawn to the grease and memories wafting from Sae's counter, and the woman greeted him like she never witnessed his loved ones' deaths.

Seated at the counter, spooning murky soup into their hungry but not starving mouths, were a trio of Peacekeepers. With them was the Head, who ignored his bowl of soup and swallowed liquor instead.

During Drusus' tenure, Peacekeepers never voluntarily associated with the Seam class and their shady market, and so long as no one was provoking riot against the Capitol, they made no attempt to shut it down. The arrangement remained after the arrival of the new Head, Cray, though Peacekeepers became regular customers since the price for something Hob was cheaper than the exact thing from Town. The only difference was the prettiness of the wrapping. Of course, there were also illegal goods like liquor and gambling cards that even humans in white uniforms sometimes couldn't resist.

Peacekeepers under Cray migrated towards the Hob instead of the Town Square, and the result was lazier law enforcing. As time passed, most of the gallows, stocks, and flog posts were taken down while some were left to collect water in various forms as a kind of perfunctory threat. No one complained unless the lack of rules was not in their favor.

The new Head's negligent attitude had a plethora of theories but they centered on the same general idea. District Twelve was the puny, least favorite child of Panem, the one picked last in Games. Present among adults when Cray was brought up was the word _demotion._

But, then, children used a different word to describe him.

* * * CRAY * * *

Creepy.

A heavy hand thumped Haymitch on the back. Cray slurred, "You again? Don't you have something better to do with your time than come here?"

Haymitch shrugged off the Head's drunken hand and comment. He asked Sae, "Need any help?"

She never did, the woman, but some years ago she looked down at two starving kids who'd rather earn a coin than beg for one. She could not say no to them. Haymitch ladled soup into bowls and Mollie, with her more pleasant smile that a thirteen-year-old Haymitch noticed was really pretty before he kissed her amid the giddiness in the seconds after New Year's Eve, served it to the customers. Sae stewed the soup and handled the money.

The cook nodded at one of two workers and expected the other to pop up over his shoulder but didn't.

"You could be coming in other places with all that money," Cray grinned, not grasping that he had been ignored.

Sae threatened to confiscate his uneaten soup while Haymitch glared at him, revolted. "Is that how you've been spending your time, _sir?_ " he snarled in reply.

Cray just laughed and rattled his liquor bottle, an action Haymitch perfected in later years. "Nothing else to do around here. Eleven had at least _some_ excitement."

"Excitement," repeated Haymitch. His scowl never averted from Cray's flushed, unconcerned face. "Wonder what kind you're talking about there. Was that why you were relegated? Too many kids with your ugly face walking around, or too many of them deemed felonious enough for you to take out the whip?"

"Watch your mouth, boy," bellowed Cray. He rose from his stool, which would have been intimidating if he were not so unsteady afterward.

The good people of the Hob barely gave their exchange a second glance. To them, it would end as another Hob brawl or someone would get shot. They kept about their business

* * * FIGHTERS AND BYSTANDERS * * *

Typical human behavior on both ends,

for as long as I can remember.

Haymitch shifted his feet and stooped, looking down. He was more than happy to keep arguing but the other officers whose roles in his nightmares made them unnervingly memorable shifted their guns that were focused on him, his mother, his brother, and a Seam girl one summer night. Besides, he told Sae he'd help her.

The boy wove around behind the stall and was handed a filthy apron. "Great," he snorted, tying it around his waist.

When the only trace of the Peacekeeper squad was their bowls left on the counter, the Hob cook's smile fell. She chided him, a firm palm to his arm. "You can't be picking fights with Peacekeepers like that, especially the damn Head."

Haymitch shrugged. He ladled broth into a clean bowl and slid it over to her. She pushed the apology away, saying, "First off, don't waste my soup. Not all of us have big fancy houses and loads of cash now. Second, just because you're a victor doesn't mean you're excused from having your ass handed to you."

His black brows waggled and the corners of his lips angled up, unlike his eyes that avoided looking at her.

"By Peacekeepers, you silly boy."

* * * FACTS ABOUT SAE * * *

She was referred to as Greasy Sae

by everyone minus two who worked for her.

She adored Mollie Hannigan and Haymitch Abernathy.

She had a son in the mines

who remained in the mines forever.

Her cooking was okay at best.

She gagged anyone who acknowledged that with a wooden spoon.

She lived through the second rebellion.

"I call it practice," explained Haymitch. His eyes took on a grayer shade of dangerous. "I want to overthrow the Capitol." That was his next move.

Sae bent toward him, away from the bustling market. I leaned in to catch her words. "You don't mean that. You're still upset over… over what happened." Haymitch scowled but did not argue against the accusation. "Seeking revenge is only going to get you killed, and you better believe no one here will intervene or join your little fantasy rebellion." She was the best example of that, standing by as guiltless damned were killed.

The victor growled, "It doesn't have to be _now_. Rebellions take time. Everything needs to be set up, unrest has to build up. I ain't talking about lame little revolts here."

"You couldn't even get our own district to rebel," Sae snapped haughtily, lowering her voice. "The whole nation would have to be involved if anything's going to get accomplished."

"Exactly. I think it's willing to be." He exhaled before quietly elaborating, "My forcefield trick angered President Snow because it made the Gamemakers look like idiots, showing that the Capitol is capable of being fooled. All of Panem saw that, and for a moment they doubted the Capitol's power. I did, and I was nearly dead. They _have_ to be thinking of rebelling."

Eyes dull, Sae shook her head. "Thinking and doing are two different things, boy."

Eyes bright, Haymitch said, "I know. My point is that it's the start of something - something big."

A few customers stepped up to the counter so the two abruptly but casually dropped their conversation, like they were not discussing a revolution. Haymitch was always acting.

As Haymitch ladled out soup, Sae told him, "You just worry about your tributes in a few months. Bring one of them home. Okay?"

"Okay," he muttered, turning with the bowls looped in his arms like souls, and served the customers, knowing that another worker was supposed to do that part.

From what I saw that night, the Hob was alive with purchasing and selling, stealing and smuggling, unaware that a plot had seeded in the mind of a young man. A personal vendetta against the Capitol would grow into a national insurgence. Haymitch was joining the bigger game a bit early. If you ask me, he'd been a part of it longer than he thought.


	8. Roll Calls

Still hungover from the Quarter Quell, Panem discarded last year's decorations and arranged the new ones for the Fifty-First Hunger Games. Huge streamers and television screens were installed in Town Squares, replacing the previous Victory Tour banners. Cameramen positioned themselves around stages for the reapings. Lenses were adjusted for the best possible shots: close-ups of those chosen.

The Capitol prepared for a festival whereas the districts prepared for their children's deaths.

The victors prepared for reliving hell, vicariously.

The show must go on.

District Twelve's reaping was scheduled at two. Since work was canceled for the annual mandatory viewing, those who were not sleeping in took advantage of the free time to get some last-minute black marketing out of the way.

I had an infant, premature for the world and for me, in my arms when Artie Everdeen and Rohan Hawthorne snuck back under the fence that surrounded the district. The bags suspended from their shoulders bounced against their hips, heavy and warm with game.

They only hunted together. The last time another friend came along was exactly one year earlier, and he was reaped.

As was routine, the hunters made their way through the streets of Twelve and delivered herbs, fruits, fish, and some squirrel meat caught that morning to exclusive buyers before trading at the Hob. By the time they arrived at Sae's stall, their bags contained their trades save for a few fish.

I swear Haymitch performed an impeccable double take when he saw his friends - or ex-friends, I should say.

Sae made casual conversation with them as they traded, to avert their attention from either the reaping or the victor behind her or both, while Haymitch stared at them as if they were not real. The boy's face could not decide whether to scowl or frown or even smile, and had contorted into an odd grimace instead. It was very similar to the infant's expression, even as I rocked it.

Only after exchanging fish for spices and gnarled baby potatoes did Rohan acknowledge his former best friend. Of all the things to say to the person who he watched attack a squadron of Peacekeepers as staccato gunshots pierced the air with a final, lingering echo, Rohan remarked, "Nice outfit."

Haymitch glanced down at his attire, the stained apron tied around his hips and the dripping spoon in his hand. His answer came with a shrug. "Call me Sae-mitch." Artie and Rohan laughed, and they could have been his friends again. Of course, they were all smart enough to know that meant becoming captured pawns. The laughter shriveled and died so they wouldn't.

Yet Haymitch craved more from the boys who were friends with his first life, and adopted the cook's safe wording and persisted, "With all that rain in the spring, the forest must be thriving. Get anything good today?"

"Yeah, lots of plants," Artie Everdeen answered to the counter. "Couldn't shoot a bird to save our lives, though." His voice had a way of resonating, the words lovely as they hit the air, like frosted breath. I didn't notice it in the bakery while the sun dripped behind the dell as chess pieces fell.

Sae crossed her arms, elbows so bony they threatened to poke through her skin. "Aren't they what keep you away from the gallows?"

"Cray can go a day without his beloved turkey." Rohan's Seam eyes disappeared under his unkempt hairline as he rolled them.

"Yeah, it's not like the fence will stop lapsing," added Artie.

"No one gives a shit if it works," Haymitch affirmed about the electric fence sporadically failing. "It's still a fence, keeping animals out."

Scratching at his hair, Artie smiled sheepishly. "And most of us in. Maintenance has always been the cause of the error since the Heads before Cray were too busy whipping our hides while Cray's too lazy to do anything at all."

"You think it's his fault for everything around here," Sae commented with a dry laugh. "Is he the reason for starvation, too, Artie?" Artie shook his head at the cook and her morbid teasing.

"Better than Drusus," said Haymitch, and no one disagreed. When the two other boys shifted their game bags and seemed to consider leaving, he blurted out, "How is everyone?" He hated the yearning he felt towards the first-life friends that forsook him but acted upon it anyway.

In the silence, the tension was palpable. Artie met Haymitch's eyes with matching dread and quickly looked away but Rohan anticipated the desperate inquiry. He gradually smiled as he answered, "All right. Nolan got into a fight with his brother a few days ago and he's been living at the Community Home again, but he's fine now. Jack is still an ass but he's an ass in the mines so it ain't our problem yet. Hazelle's still an overachiever in everything she ever does, studying and working around the clock." Haymitch chuckled, wounded with each name in the roll call. Rohan hooked an arm around Artie. "And this idiot's been seeing the apothecary's daughter."

Haymitch bent toward Rohan with mock beguilement. "Verbena Clery? She's a grade above me and Artie, in your grade, right?" Rohan nodded, his expression equally amazed and teasing.

Artie was already armed with a counterattack. "Well, let's not forget Rohan's budding romance with Miss Monalow." He received a hand's worth of knuckles dug into his head and twisted for tossing that piece of gossip onto the counter.

"Please," muttered Haymitch, unconvinced, hastily serving a half-smiling customer who had overheard them. "Hazelle's too smart to date a flirt like him. Huh, Rohan?"

The answer of guilty chuckling proved him right. Note charm was the most evident trait Rohan Hawthorne passed down to his firstborn, along with the towering stature and rugged appearance that supported it. While Rohan hunted illegally, he was not much of a revolutionary.

Sae collected some money before offhandedly adding, "I can't believe that girl would drop her schedule for you, Rohan."

"Believe me, she doesn't."

There was some more harmless chatting but I left then, the negative-four-month-old still grimacing against my black heart. Humans talking about other humans did not interest me in the least. They were all going to die so why did it matter? Humans that defied and changed mattered; they affected more than their lifetimes.

Eventually and anticlimactically, Rohan Hawthorne and Artie Everdeen left the Hob, and Haymitch expected that. He almost accepted it. What he did not expect was Rohan twisting around, saying, "Happy, uh, very belated birthday, by the way," in a voice that lilted at the end as he realized how stupid that must have sounded. His smile remained genuine.

Haymitch's seventeenth birthday was spent on Stephan's porch, seconds after the day was declared the fourth of February; he had been startled awake. Too many minutes after midnight, Stephan heard the knocking through his sleep and invited the boy in.

That had been months ago, after the Victory Tour. The reaping was that afternoon, and a year from then he slated to fight in the arena. _Where had time gone? Why was it blurring?_

Suddenly nauseous, Haymitch left Sae and the Hob for the Victors' Village, where a pressed suit and a solemn yet well-rested Uncle Sear awaited him. He might have regretted not thanking Rohan or wishing them both good luck but they wouldn't need it, anyway.

The last civil conversation between the three boys was added to the queue of Haymitch's memories, strung up and ready to be remembered at his death.

On that same day, another memory: Haymitch's first reaping as a mentor.

He realized as he smeared his palms down his thighs that it was more shaming than being a tribute. Tributes were provided by the districts to die for entertainment. Mentors were the lifelines of said entertainment. Last year, Haymitch fought and won, and somehow he was supposed to know how to instruct that. His district would hold him responsible for anything that went awry in the already unfavorable tributes' odds.

After the district mayor droned on about why they were there and why there were Hunger Games, she recited the names of past Twelve victors, the second roll call of the day. Stephan and then Haymitch stood as their names were met with applause, even a handful of catcalls and whistles after the newest champion. They thought he could bring a winner home.

As a colorful bird lady curled her tattooed fingers around a slip of paper, Haymitch scanned the faces until he found his ex-friends in the section for seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Their faces blanched, their brows creased, they listened for two words that were hopefully not too familiar.

A year from then he had been in a section assigned to his age, impatiently dreading the drawing of four name slips, two of which could have been him, one of which was. Frowning down at all of the faces of _children_ who had a possibility of being either a Haymitch Abernathy or a Maysilee Donner, he regretted winning.

But he was alive to regret it so he lived with it.

He listened as the district held its breath.

* * * ROLL CALL OF THE REAPED * * *

"Agatha Clarke!"

"Toben Sicabee!"

They were the first of many losers.


	9. Viewer Discretion is Not Optional

From one of twelve offices in the Games Headquarters, "He can't do that!"

In the same room, seated in a different black swivel chair, "Haymitch, please…"

"He can't do that! He - no, that... that's against the rules!" Shock, rage, and anguish twisted the boy's face into something grotesque, hauntingly familiar to when Rayan collapsed in front of him. I still remember it.

I'd collected Miss Agatha Clarke from under a male tribute's heaving body, before the hovercraft and after the canon fire. She was with me but he was still with her.

I should tell you now that the boy from Four did not win. But please do not rejoice. I'm just telling you that.

"That's against the rules!" As Stephan's veined arms restrained him from lunging at the screen - as if he could somehow end the show - Haymitch bellowed, "He can't, he can't, _he_ _fucking_ _can't!_ "

* * * A MENTOR'S GRIEF * * *

He mourned the tribute

who had reasons to live back home.

He was already dreading their faces

before he shuffled over and

handed them an insignificant _sorry_ that

they would tell themselves they accepted.

Except those who mourned Agatha did not know exactly why he apologized.

Sometimes the Hunger Games were censored for the sake of the Capitol audience.

The main screen in the Control Room that showed what was broadcasted to Panem had cut away from the ongoing assault to an allied trio. A contender clutching a bloody lasso that doubled as a noose stared into inky darkness while the other two discussed in terse whispers when to literally backstab her. Their hot, putrid breath fogged up their sleeping bags' material.

Surrounding the main screen was a grid of smaller ones, all live, only viewable to mentors and Gamemakers. The Gamemakers controlled what was publicized from those screens. They had a show to put on. The mentors watched over their tributes and willed the others to stay off their screens.

To Haymitch's dismay, five days into the competition, Agatha Clarke and the District Four contender were on the same screen.

* * * PAUSE, REWIND, PLAY * * *

So you humans can understand something.

Toben Sicabee was fifteen years old and Stephan's responsibility since both District Twelve mentors had agreed in advance Haymitch would guide the tribute least likely to know him from his first life. So the older girl it was.

Agatha Clarke was eighteen and transiently in love.

Upon learning the depth of that latter detail in his own charming way, Haymitch resented the Justice Building layout.

He had opened a door in the labyrinth of rooms referred to as the Justice Building in hope of finding the restroom. Instead he found Agatha, who earlier had mounted the stage with a mane of flaxen ringlets and hesitant bearing, folded around a guy he recognized as the florist's only son.

His stomach chilled, a reaction he developed after the executions that never left him. _Mollie_. That could have been them, high up in a tree facing east during sunset.

Haymitch was already in the process of leaving when he entered. "Oh, shit," he muttered apologetically.

Two Town-capped heads swiveled around, yet only their intruder wanted to vanish from existence. Embarrassment smudged the young victor's face and set his ears ablaze.

Agatha Clarke, the school deity, had merely laughed. Her pretty laugh violated the criteria of a recently reaped child's behavior.

Meanwhile, her boyfriend glared daggers at Haymitch. He proudly wore the attitude of _Hunger Games champion or not, I will say goodbye to my girl without your interruption, thank you very much_. It was effective despite Agatha's nonchalance.

"No worries," the young lady assured her mentor as he shut the door. He was still repeatedly stabbed by another pair of blue eyes.

The door creaked too loudly and did not seem to close all the way.

More often than not, Haymitch left bad first impressions on his tributes.

* * * PAUSE, FAST FORWARD, PLAY * * *

The train lurched out of Twelve's station.

Stephan eyed Toben Sicabee shovel large globs of ice cream into his mouth. He spoke across the table to the tributes. "How about you tell us about yourselves?" He mastered the friendly, unthreatening tone after years of practice.

The Capitol escort trilled, "Yes, introductions would be appropriate!" She only knew their names and what their faces looked like when they realized they could be dead within a week.

Toben kept eating but listened as Agatha obeyed. "I'm Agatha," she said, setting a fork down onto the rim of her plate. "I graduated school in the spring. My parents own the grocery, but it's mostly my mother and I working because my father goes out and gambles." She rolled her globular eyes at that. "Um, my best friend is Harleigh Sommers, and I'm dating Dawson Moore."

If only her boyfriend had sat across from her instead of the Seam boy... Alas, Haymitch waited years for a pair of star-crossed lovers.

The other tribute swallowed sheepishly. "I'm Toben. I've never had a girlfriend or anything but I like to think I'm good with people so maybe alliances are a possibility for me. I don't know how it works. But I'm one of the fastest runners in my class and I'm not too weak." He was very skinny.

"What about you?" Haymitch asked Agatha. "What are your skills?"

"Not sure," she admitted with a shrug. "I don't really think about that on a daily basis, like, you know, most people."

Haymitch retorted, "Well, most people die in the Hunger Games." Somehow his remark had not troubled her. "Start thinking. You've got some spunk and you're attractive enough. Play it up with the crowd, make them like you. It will earn you sponsors."

She nodded, smiled sweet as honey. "Okay. I will."

His eyes were as empty as Toben's dessert dish yet his reciprocating half-smile was hopeful like the promise of seconds.

* * * PAUSE, FAST FORWARD, PLAY * * *

Until Stephan's death, Haymitch snuck pudding

into their quarters on the train.

That night was the commencement of the tradition.

The flavor was chocolate.

When the bowls contained only spoons and leftover swirls of pudding, the mentors discussed the children pretending to sleep in the train car separate from theirs.

"She's in shock," Stephan explained to Haymitch, who had flattened out on the bed halfway through his dessert. "Happens every few years; it's a lot to process."

Haymitch scowled at his own mentor from under his knotted brows. "Then she'd better get her damn head out of her ass and in the Games before it's chopped off."

Stephan glared, then, though he remained patient. "Just keep doing what you are doing. Believe it or not, you're actually quite supportive."

The younger mentor hauled himself up from the supine position, his head sagging into his hands and his elbows indenting his knees. The bed sighed with him. "I just want to bring someone home, Stephan. You've been working at it for so long, and now with two of us, it finally might happen."

"I'm certain I brought you home; you're too surly to be a hallucination."

"But more than just us. They're waiting to see what I'm - we're going to do. I'm not saying we start a winning streak, I doubt we can, but morale in Twelve would explode if we won consecutive years." I've always believed young, hesitant idealists make the most bitter cynics. How unfortunate for us all that I'm not often wrong. Haymitch stuffed a silk pillow between his ribs, cradling it to his abdomen, and hitched his brow. "It all depends with Toben and Agatha."

Toben _and_ Agatha.

An eggshell shard chipped off the old man's face then, under the left eye. It fell to the carpet. Decades of failure had left tiny tiny splinters. He was slowly falling to pieces.

"Only one victor, Haymitch."

"I know." His voice shook.

* * * PAUSE, FAST FORWARD, PLAY * * *

The night before the Hunger Games

revealed a lot about a tribute.

She waited until Stephan and Toben stepped off the elevator to offer four words to her mentor.

"I know I'm worthless," murmured Agatha. Her dress for the interviews sagged, the glitter on her halter dulled, and the rouge across her cheekbones staled. Her eyelashes had frayed from their uniform fan and collected small droplets of brine.

After blinking several times, Haymitch found the right words. He grasped them and threw them at her before she could walk out and let the elevator doors slide closed between them. "Your interview went well. The audience adores you!"

"Thanks to your guidance. But people can only go so far with just their sponsors. The others have sponsors as well as skill."

"You can't give up now," he instructed. "Not before it's even begun." He knew she could.

She smiled her honey smile. "I couldn't have asked for a better mentor. Thank you for trying, Haymitch." A fat tear rolled down her face, then another. She sighed, laughed at herself. "Dawson Moore. I never thought of marrying him, you know. He wanted to, I think, but he never said anything to me - never will. That one girl, Mollie Hannigan?"

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," repeated Agatha. She jabbed her thumb onto a button that kept the elevator doors from closing. Someone on the ground floor was infuriated. "Everybody assumed you two were going to get married."

He had no words.

Agatha nibbled on her lips slathered with a paint that complimented her eyes. "You deserved each other more than Dawson and I did."

Haymitch held her hand as they walked out of the elevator, feeling like he had already failed.

* * * PAUSE, FAST FORWARD, PLAY * * *

The victors pursued their newest member as soon as his tribute was eliminated.

They heard rumors but wanted to see the chessman for themselves.

Haymitch swore an icicle was lodged in his insides. Dust and grime streaked down the back of his pants from being dragged out from under their Control Room table. His eyes were swollen and lurid.

He was the sitting definition of _misery_.

Though he could have been:

Agatha, the girl whose blood-soaked clothes were torn as different unpleasant things lodged into her body, whose eyes remained blue and soulless after the hovercraft finally collected her.

Or Toben, the boy who reached the supplies at the Cornucopia too late and found himself on the opposite end of a hilt. He was not fast enough to be the first contender killed in the Fifty-First Hunger Games, but came in a close second.

They were losers. Haymitch Abernathy was a victor.

After the dragging, Haymitch was brought back to the Training Center lobby and handed a glass of water. The ice was dyed cyan and glowed. He drank it expecting it was toxic.

Besides the glitzy receptionist, only victors and victors freed from their duty as mentors hung around the lobby during the Games.

They watched Stephan Hendricks kneel in front of his shivering fellow mentor and speak softly to him.

One made his way over. "Stephan?" The mousy voice belonged to ill-fitting glasses and eyes the color of soot.

For the second time, Stephan scissored his string of comforting words to address witnesses. "I can handle this more than you can, Beetee."

While Beetee stood there figuring out what to do with himself, another victor came up behind him. "You should get him back to his room, Stephan." She had warm honey eyes yet her smile was nonexistent and her dark arms were chiseled. "Would you want that, darling?"

The darling raised his head then, and in the diagonal stare between him and the woman all he managed to croak out was, "He hurt her."

"And no one outside of this building saw it. She kept her honor, as did the boy in that sense." How telling it was of their violent culture that Agatha Clarke was slaughtered for all of Panem to see and the woman assured her mentor she still had her honor.

"Does it... happen a lot?"

"It happens."

"But she was so nice and she helped her mother while her father gambled and she didn't know if Dawson would propose and Harleigh-" Haymitch startled at the gentle touch on his shoulder. He scrutinized her then. "I know you."

"My name's Seeder. Now come. Stephan, help him." There was more dragging.

Haymitch slept in front of his mentor's door that night, curled into his chilled abdomen. The dreams that ravaged him kept him from knocking, for he feared disturbing the silence would further their angry pursuit.

Outside of their suite, the Capitol partied and watched the show, minus some losers.


	10. The Showstoppers

Like Stephan Hendricks, I will cut my chronological string of words to tell you that Haymitch Abernathy was not always the way he was in his second life or the close of his first.

Yes, as a young boy he used to be affable. He used to smile more. He used to wake up early. He used to be innocent.

Apart from his name, most of his appearance, and his fierce love for his family, one thing remained unchanged.

Even after surviving the terrors of the Second Quarter Quell, Haymitch believed suffocating was the worst way to die. As a victor, he was exempt from work in the coal mines but the common collier's death still frightened him. There was no way out besides finding a way to breathe, which, if that was possible, one would not be suffocating in the first place.

* * * AN ODD SIMILARITY * * *

A Jewish fist fighter vowed I

would feel his fist on my face

before I captured him.

Haymitch Abernathy feared asphyxiation

because there was no fight.

A pair of fighters,

who did not resist at all

when I collected their souls.

Haymitch had the aversion ever since he was nine. As the oldest child in his family, he stepped up to receive the Medal of Valor while I, with a starved soul yanking on my sleeve, stayed and watched the ceremony. Haymitch was the only child who grasped a plaque, his knuckles skull white. Brows defensive and eyes sorrowful, he stood amongst grieving wives in the Justice Building.

His weak ferocity melted my cold plastic heart. It was not a smart decision, I will admit that, but after everything I am glad I began visiting him whenever he was near the souls I gathered.

Receiving the Medal of Valor in the Justice Building was the first time I saw him. Seven more years and he'd be there again, mumbling temporary goodbyes to his family, and the year after that he'd disrupt Agatha Clarke kissing a boy she was in transient love with. Each time, the sky through the Justice Building ceiling was a swollen, cloud-spat azure.

Something else I noticed about Haymitch as he accepted the Medal of Valor was that he was swallowed by a coal miner's jacket, a wax coat with buttoned pockets. His scraped shins protruded from underneath the grungy black hem, and one sleeve completely hid his free hand while the other was scrunched down to accommodate enough fingers to hold the plaque.

At the time, I could only guess where the child had acquired it. He was far too young to be a collier.

* * * WORDS BETWEEN RAYAN AND COLTON ABERNATHY * * *

"If he's going to steal your coat and hide in our trunk,

he should at least try to stay awake."

"Rayan, we have ourselves a brilliant child."

"Well, wake the brilliant child up."

"Leave him be. I don't need a coat

on a summer morning like this, anyway."

"Fine. Be careful, Colton. I love you."

"Love you, too."

A half-dreamt conversation floating around in his mind, Haymitch awoke to sirens and the smell of his father's coat, henceforth his.

His father's death soured him. Imagine the effect of forty-seven deaths, all kids who died instead of him. I'll wait while you do.

Haymitch could have been those other tributes, the losers, carried away by metal hovercraft talons. But with the help of one, he survived.

Her name was Maysilee Donner.

She wasn't allowed to live if he did.

She was from Town and a grade above him, not unlike Agatha Clarke, so it was understandable their lives did not overlap.

Except his friend Adam Bluet lived next door to the Donners' sweetshop.

The entrepreneurs in Town lived above their businesses. The shops were pressed together, nervous, alleys between them that were arm's length apart.

So say the butcher's son had his new bruised-gray-eyed friend from the Seam sleep over on the same night Maysilee Donner and her twin sister Lauren invited friends to their birthday slumber party. What happens? Some window-crossing, of course.

Adam and Haymitch had entered Adam's bedroom, which was a little cramped but all his. His sister Rooba was in the room adjacent to it, his parents across a narrow hallway. Complaining about something a teenager would complain about with fervor, Haymitch unceremoniously threw himself onto the bed meant for one yet was bigger than his own mattress that he and Cory shared.

While Haymitch sunk into Adam's bed and Adam sat against the door, a plethora of chattering girls scuttled into the Donner sisters' room, across the alley from the boys. Agatha Clarke and Verbena Clery were among them but they were of the wiser group that would stay in the room.

Rolling her head to shift a golden braid over her shoulder, a young lady spotted the boy with black coils of hair in the adjacent building. She gasped at the scandal.

All the blue eyes in the room peered out the window. Snickers followed.

Adam noticed them and slid the window open while his friend slipped off the bed to peer out with him. Composed amusement had settled on both their faces. They were actually elated.

"Hello, ladies!" Adam's words hobbled across the alleyway, an inept charm that seemed all too familiar to the waving girls. All he needed was a waggle of the eyebrows to make him the punchline of their night.

"Hi," they answered back, not in unison nor in any particular order. Maysilee Donner called out, "What's new?"

Haymitch spoke then, withholding his trust in Adam. "Enjoying the weekend. Yourself?"

There was something about Seam boys that drew bubbling giggles from the Town girls' lips.

"The very same!" replied Verbena, whose freckles and skin the color of paste reminded Haymitch of tapioca pudding. The majority of his thoughts revolved around food and how to get it. Though the Bluet family's pantry was available to him whenever he visited, he never ate a morsel more than Adam. He earned his food, he did not rely on a friend's privileges. Interestingly enough, Adam groused about stomach aches every morning after his friend left for the Seam.

Harleigh Sommers whispered to Maysilee, "Sure, he's cute - but he's a complete asshole around his cronies," to which she playfully whispered back, "Adam, a crony?" Laughter erupted from the Donner sisters' window and the boys had no idea it was directed teasingly at them.

At fourteen years of age, Adam attempted the impossible. "Why don't you girls cross over?" He drawled as if it was nothing but really it was something.

As the others dubiously considered his suggestion, Maysilee Donner played along and, to the everlasting joy of Adam Bluet and Haymitch Abernathy, assented. The fifteen-year-old stepped across the alleyway, two stories above the ground, from windowsill to windowsill. She was engulfed in inky darkness in a moment of pure beauty, and then Adam's bedroom lights illuminated her silhouette to her astonished peers behind her.

Her sister watched as party guests followed the braver twin. Soon, three girls lounged around Adam's bedroom while those who hadn't crossed tried not to die of hysterics or worse, _wake Mister and Missus Donner!_

The young lady who recognized the Seam boy sidled next to him and piped, "What happened to your eye, Mitchie?"

His eye twitched then so he blinked, hard. Its swelling had gone down and a waxy peach shadowed the entire hollow. "It's nothing," was his reply. "Just got into a little brawl." By brawl he meant a failed pickpocket attempt that ended when he was lifted up off his sorry ass by Mollie Hannigan and the Town boy who punched him.

The girls present gasped. One asked if he fought off his assailant. Adam barely suppressed a sound in his throat. "I most certainly did," Haymitch lied. He was met with bloated azure eyes and gulps and _nuh-uh_ s and an escaped laugh from Adam Bluet.

"Does it hurt?" asked another, reaching up to press her cool fingers onto the bruise. Mild pain bloomed under her fingertips and he shrugged.

"Hands off him, Harleigh," chided Maysilee. "He's been _in love_ , I heard, for one whole year. Is that true, Mitchie?" Her party guests provoked him until he smirked down at his hands.

His wrists poking out of his jacket sleeves was the final image of that memory. It only existed in his queue of dying visions because of what came after it: the Fiftieth Hunger Games.

When Haymitch and Maysilee allied under the domed arena, it was a memory that acknowledged they _had_ known each other once before.

When Haymitch and Maysilee severed their alliance, it was a memory that reminded them of home. Home was so close then.

When Haymitch held Maysilee's hand as she slipped into my arms, it was the only memory of them together that the audience did not share. They had seen everything else: the candy pink flamingoes impaling her throat and Maysilee choking on her own blood and the rock resurfacing from the cliff that became Haymitch's winning, fate-sealing tactic.

They would be remembered and never broadcasted again. I present to you the showstoppers, mutant flamingo edition.

* * * UPCOMING EDITION * * *

Star-crossed lovers on fire.

But I will not jump ahead. I've only broken the story to share the beauty of Maysilee Donner crossing from windowsill to windowsill and the precipitant of Haymitch's virulence.


	11. Miserable Company

How could someone recover from a death they were responsible for?

* * * THE ANSWER * * *

They can't.

But misery loves company.

Haymitch Abernathy acquired a fermented coping method years after his first tributes, but at the beginning of his mentorship, he sought out the people like him: victors. They would become his only confidants.

More of an aloof hornet than a social butterfly, Haymitch followed Stephan around their penthouse in the Training Center the morning after Agatha's elimination. He did not want to be alone with thoughts of his tributes yet only his mentor could comfort him; everyone else were strangers.

Instead of calling for room service, Stephan proposed eating breakfast out in the city. Tributes ate in the refectory during their training while their mentors and the visiting victors could utilize their privileges to Capitol restaurants. Haymitch was too morose to bother refusing Stephan's offer but he pettily claimed rights to the elevator buttons, which only amused his old mentor.

"Do you all eat together?" asked Haymitch, feigning disinterest. He shrugged on his coal miner jacket, a contraband his stylist had not filtered out of his luggage. His shoulders had filled out since his first life but the sleeves were still baggy.

"No," replied Stephan. "Just friends of mine, whoever's not mentoring."

"Are they all old?"

Stephan chuckled at that. "Some of them are close to your age." He clarified when Haymitch grimaced. "If I can tolerate you, I can make friends with younger people."

"But what do you talk about? I doubt they can relate to your back problems or how you get winded after you walk up the stairs," said Haymitch. "The only thing you'd have in common is the Games." He realized on his own. "Oh."

The older victor nodded. "That bonds even the most different people in the worst, closest way possible."

Their conversation fell before the cab ride to Nero's Cafe. Any more discussion near their magenta-skinned cabdriver would have been unsafe, even though he was more focused on the screen installed in his dashboard than the cobbled road, let alone his passengers. The annual show was down to its top eight tributes, progressing to an epic finale that everyone except those who had already won eagerly awaited.

The boy from District Four was no longer competing. He wept remorse as I held him.

A hostess asked for Haymitch's autograph as he and Stephan entered the restaurant. He misspelled his last name to see if she would notice, and she didn't. She was ogling at his chest and arms so blatantly that _Haymitch Abrenathy_ assumed his old jacket was torn open. She led them to their table and brushed shoulders with him as she left.

Somewhat agitated, he sat himself next to Stephan, who faced a rather diverse group of conversing, joking, spluttering victors. Haymitch recognized most of them, as did I. Their home districts ranged from Two, a district that revered the Hunger Games, to Eleven, the exact opposite. Origins didn't matter when it came to food and camaraderie, apparently.

Throw them into an arena again and that could - and _would_ \- all change.

All eyes were on the newcomer, either directly or slipping glances through Stephan. They were as discreet as the hostess.

The only stare Haymitch returned was that of an elderly victor, Magdalena Barros, from the far end of the table. She and the boy who killed Agatha's soul before her body shared similar district features. Their eyes were the same shade of green, and while Mags' were not vicious and crazed, but wise and gentle, they very well could have been in a different, less civil setting. Then again, hadn't Haymitch seen himself fight in the footage recaps?

Nevertheless, he refused to reciprocate the woman's nod of acknowledgement, and eventually she looked away.

Of course, he'd grudgingly forgive her as he failed more and more tributes, learning or perhaps wishing it was not always the mentor's fault. Besides, both were quite the rebels.

Haymitch ordered enough food and robotically ate once it arrived so that Stephan would not worry. He played off the nudge of the waitress' hip as she served the steaming platters by reaching over for his napkin.

The woman from the night before, Seeder Jones of District Eleven, leaned forward and spoke to the quiet, slouching boy. Her words danced around, across the table, and finally bowed on his platter, knee-deep in fluffy yellow eggs. Despite the lack of applause, there was an encore.

"Haymitch?" she asked again. "I said, have you been feeling better?"

He heard her the first time but knew his answer would come out weak in front of the people he needed to impress.

Stephan answered for him. "He just needed some sleep, is all. Under a lot of new pressure, just like we were once."

Seeder cast the boy a sympathetic look before returning to her bowl of hot grain, berries and cream added.

Next to her, a tall, bald, dark-skinned victor in his early twenties said, "You get used to it, as bad as it sounds. Soon you'll be able to pick out the ones to train and the ones not worth wasting your time."

Haymitch's eyes flickered to the man's left arm, noting it was a knobby stub. He spat, "I'm not giving up on anyone, Chaff."

Chaff Anders of Eleven snickered. "You remember me, then?"

"Your arm, but yes."

"I like this kid, Stephan!"

"Tell me that, not him."

Chaff stood up, and Haymitch tensed for a fight but Chaff looped around the table, dragging his chair, and threw his whole arm around Haymitch after plopping down next to him. Haymitch's shoulders scrunched in, his abdomen burned icily. His fingers found that not-rhythm on the placemat, close but not close enough to a butter knife. "I'm sitting by you now," decided Chaff, and that was when Haymitch smelled his breath. He looked at the other man's juice glass and saw a liquor bottle trying to hide behind it.

Haymitch focused on the pulp fibers floating around in his glass of orange juice. The juice glass was full but the waitress stopped by wielding a pitcher and filled it to the brim.

District Three's Beetee Ma tried to summon her over to replenish his cup as well but she sashayed away. "Oh, um, okay," he stuttered, sliding his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. Someone snorted.

Zane Derks from Eight chuckled at Haymitch. He was about nineteen and had won the year before Haymitch, an excellent specimen Haymitch could befriend. "You know, when they say we have public access, they mean _public access_." His district accent prevented Haymitch from knowing whether that was supposed to be sensual. The cackles around the table verified it was. _"_ You might be able to see her before you leave, if you want. At least she'd be your choice, better than your sponsors." He considered something, grinned sheepishly. "Or any of us."

"What are you talking about?"

"Zane," Stephan Hendricks warned.

As Zane held up his hands in mock surrender, and as the other victors quieted or laughed somewhat nervously, Haymitch pressed. "Wait, what do you mean? What does he mean, Stephan? I met my sponsors at all those banquets last year."

Chaff shook his head. "That's not what he meant, kid."

"Oh, Stephan," breathed Seeder. "You didn't tell him?"

"Tell me _what?_ " Haymitch implored.

"Why should I have? It's not relevant to him, not in his situation," reasoned Stephan, crunching into buttered toast.

Seeder countered, "He should at least know! What if he said something that got him in trouble?"

"Said _what?_ "

"More trouble than he has already suffered? We're all going to be in trouble if we don't end this discussion," Stephan angrily whispered back.

The others seated at the table wore somber masks, not agreeing or disagreeing.

Molten honey eyes glared at all of them and then faced Haymitch. "Those of us deemed attractive enough are sold to sponsors and other clients. Family is used as blackmail."

Besides Stephan's second-long scowl, they continued to eat and drink and talk, ignoring the secret that sat in the center of the table. No one picked it up, not even Haymitch.

He then noticed how handsome Zane was, with his chestnut hair and hazel eyes, his cleft chin, his grin as wide as his jaw. He noticed the others as well, older in age but healthy and famous enough to be desired and _bought_.

Chaff must have said something remotely funny and mitigating because he roared above the whole table.

"Shut up, will you?" yelled a playful, scratchy voice that had gotten up from its seat and crept behind Haymitch. A pair of hands shuttered his eyes and the same voice murmured into his ear, "You're not going to tell anyone, are you, handsome?"

He lurched away from the voice, into the lips of another victor. Yelping at the intimate contact he could not bring himself to return, he shoved the owner of voice behind him hard and tumbled to the floor.

The restaurant muted.

Stephan admonished his friends while rising to assist the sputtering boy. They were laughing too loud to notice, though. Only those from the night before, Beetee and Seeder, looked worried.

The voice from behind belonged to Lyme Natterson of Two. Her mouth smirked and her lofty, muscular frame loomed above Haymitch but her hand reached down in something of a plead for forgiveness. It was her sad, broken eyes that prompted Haymitch to not hate the victors and to never forget that breakfast.

I was not present during the disastrous first impression at Nero's Cafe. I had collected the souls of slaughtered children on the cafe's television the victors pretended they were not watching.

*

Hunger Games victors were the pinnacle of my hatred for the human race.

Dictators, liars, and killers all rode the carousel of eternity. The victors were rare devices of the tyrants in Panem, representing their districts as well as serving as Capitol pawns. They were unlike victims of murder but somehow very close. They scraped and clawed past me and even added to my expanding roll call of the deceased. My arid throat continues to rasp out children's names, though not because of other children.

But no matter how many years since the final canon blasts they were alive to hear, no matter what state I found them in when I finally captured them - in bed, in war, in air and suspended by nooses, in the dregs of poisoned lives like Stephan and Haymitch - the victors were scared children forced to play the Capitol's Games.

I was the result they feared and desired, they the living victims I could not yet save.

I still despise the world they came from, what it had done to them. But I loved them.

I love them all.

Usually my work is done before any survivors discover the corpses, but with those Capitol devices, I stayed and rocked them, talked to them, and listened to their final thoughts and viewed their dying visions.

I had already remembered Haymitch from past encounters so the story that unfolded from his dying visions made me cry and laugh and scream obscenities to walls full of unread books. I thought I had finally figured out the ironic comedians who mock me as they commit the most heinous and the most compassionate acts, but alas, I still do not. Eternity doesn't seem long enough.

But I must return to one of seven stories that reconcile me when I think of that.

* * * TWO YEARS INTO HIS SECOND LIFE * * *

Haymitch thought he knew the Capitol and its evil

but had seen nothing yet in comparison to what lay ahead of him.

Marana Shingott of Ten escaped her scheming allies when Agatha Clarke's canon fired. The amount of contenders left in the arena were dwindling down too low for her comfort. Taking her only weapon, she silently broke the alliance and stole away into the inky darkness.

Winning the Hunger Games was not enough, apparently; the day after her first tribute's elimination was her initiation into the miserable company of Capitol devices. The girl carried out all of the same hazings they had once, from sprinting down the Control Room corridor naked to swallowing a mouthful of whatever shit Chaff was drinking that day. The latter was most challenging, each victim admitted after vomiting.

It still amuses me that the victors would always find some way to control themselves and each other when they lost that power altogether when they were reaped.

At one end of the Control Room hallway, where a silent servant impatiently ushered out a few dozen laughing victors, Haymitch said, "You know, you're allowed to skip that one."

"Great," Marana grumbled, snatching her shirt from his outstretched arm. " _Now_ someone bothers to tell me. Did you wuss out?"

"Well, I sort of got kissed by Chaff and ended up on the floor of a cafe, which was in the tabloids for a bit, so I just went ahead and skipped the hazings."

"That's rough," the girl relented. "I mean, Chaff? Gross." A throaty chuckle from the back of Haymitch's head prompted her to chide, "Enough with the modesty. I'm decent, I swear."

"Just trying to be a gentleman."

"Oh, gentleman, my ass. You just saw me run!"

Haymitch smirked, and vivid gray sliced through her as he turned around. He admitted, "I didn't even know it was him."

Marana asked if Chaff was drunk, which was a _yeah_ , if Haymitch kissed back, which was a _no_ , and if Chaff was a good kisser, which Haymitch answered honestly. That's all I will tell.

Zane slammed the door to the Control Room behind him. His expression was blunt knives thrown at the two other victors. Chuckling sardonically, he greeted them, "The two new bastards, mucking about while the rest of us work. Well, the rest of _them_." His eyes indicated the mentors behind the door. "Look, I'm going to explode if I don't get out of here."

Marana suggested, "You can take me to Nero's now." Because of Haymitch's disaster at the cafe, his friends declared it the official hangout for devices of the Capitol variety. Haymitch and Stephan began to eat in their suite again.

So, of course, Haymitch protested with vehemence, but whether it was because of his last meal there or the thought of going out where _the_ _colorful_ _bird_ _people_ were after they'd seen both District Twelve tributes die during the first day of the Hunger Games was up to the observer.

"Shut up, Haymitch," said Zane. "Chaff's still mentoring. I promise he won't kiss you."

Haymitch rolled his eyes and exhaled but followed them out of the Games Headquarters. He didn't have anywhere else pleasant to go while Stephan was high in the penthouse.

"So your girl's out?" Marana asked.

Zane glared ahead. "Affirmative, kid."

"That's actually surprising. She could have beaten me up." Haymitch coaxed a reluctantly genuine smile out of Zane. "And you know what? I would have let her."

"Of course you would have," Zane replied. His tone suggested something not quite related to what was said.

"What's that supposed to mean?" he retorted, stopping at the curb to sneer at Zane. A shrug from the young man controverted his suspicion - nothing was wrong.

Until, "What's _he_ doing outside?" A tattooed elderly woman frowned underneath her striped parasol, her elfin nose crinkling.

Haymitch spun around. Through the woman's parasol a white tunic made its way towards them. "An Avox?" He faced Zane, who'd visited the Capitol more than he had and was therefore knowledgable in their customs, but Zane only shrugged as the servant walked towards them.

The Avox's chest mimicked his head by bowing before the Capitol devices. He presented a slip of paper with small, stark words printed in the center. It reminded them of reaping slips that bore potential tributes' names.

The three victors stared at the parchment, the Avox stared at the tiled sidewalk. Capitol citizens flowed around them, watching them watch but eventually returning to their own selfish affairs.

Marana spoke first. "Hey, um, who's that for?"

Haymitch elbowed her hard in the ribs with his scowl and hissed, "He's an Avox, you idiot. He can't talk!"

Muttering something about _newbies_ , Zane plucked the slip from the servant's hand and read its message aloud. The small reaping would not have been completed if he did not read the names printed on it, along with instructions.

Ladies first: "Marana Shingott."

* * * MARANA SHINGOTT, WALKING CONTRADICTION * * *

A poor farm girl, an experienced killer,

with charming eyes and hooligan demeanor.

Her tanned skin was freckled,

her long hair coarse,

her girlish body scrawny.

Not cute enough for Capitol standards,

yet famous enough to be

sponsored and sold.

Last but not least, the gentlemen: "Haymitch Abernathy."

Before his friends and the tongueless slave, Zane Derks forced himself to continue. "You are to report to the Presidential Mansion at three o'clock."

"I'm - we're… This can't be good, Haymitch." Marana was frantic yet hesitant. What happened to the hooligan? She was slapped by her name on the parchment, silenced by the foreign city surrounding her.

Handing the slip back to the Avox to dispose of it, Zane shook his head. "I thought this was for me. It's how they send clients' addresses, times of the dates, all that." He addressed Haymitch, "Looks like we were all wrong about you. You will be thanking them after all. Usually they break the news your first year, like Shingott here. By the way, sorry about that, kid."

A storm raging behind his eyes, Haymitch asked him, "How can you talk about that so calmly, as if it's nothing?"

Zane shrugged again, that time confirming what Haymitch did not want to accept. "Because you survive it. For me, it protects my dad so whatever." The apathy smeared on his face could not quite hide the pain pinching his hazel eyes.

* * * THREE O'CLOCK * * *

Two hours never felt so long.

The cab ride there was too quick.

"Now then, onto Mister Abernathy. It seems," the president of Panem began, sweeping his hand sideways to relocate papers to another region of his desk, "that you have forgotten how much power the Capitol has over you, or even how much power we have in general." His voice was blood, vital and, for the most part, safe until it seeped out of its television screen veins.

President Coriolanus Snow appeared older in person than he was on television, in his late thirties or early forties with emeralds for eyes and hair the color of the coffee dregs in his cup. After he told Marana she was to become a prostitute in order to save her three sisters, mother, and grandfather, he sent out an Avox with a stern yet relaxed order for more coffee, along with a cup and saucer for each of his guests. The Avox hadn't returned yet.

She was promptly beheaded for being present in the president's office while he proposed an ultimatum to a new victor.

I held her close as I watched the president, the sex slave, and the chessman through the triangled weapons of two Peacekeepers guarding the doors.

* * * AN OFFHAND THOUGHT * * *

She could not scream for help or cry out in pain,

so how could she have told anyone

about the secret transaction?

The president of Panem knew the assumption his devices drew from the Avox's absence would set an appropriate atmosphere for their conference. He was rather effective with opening them.

Both standing in front of President Snow's desk, avoiding his unnerving gaze, a pallid Marana shuddered under the weight of muffled sobs while a livid Haymitch clenched and unclenched his fists inside his miner jacket pockets.

President Snow's next words were so calm they were cold, as cold as the sensation in Haymitch's middle. "You were careful to remain passive in that new house of yours. You're a smart one, Haymitch. Tell me, how do I know that?"

To prevent himself from screaming, Haymitch focused on the hand of the arm of the president's chair. It was fairly ornate, but knobbed like Chaff's left limb. Pale fingers curled around it so his gaze climbed up to the perfectly white rose tucked inside their owner's lapel.

Haymitch swallowed back the swell in his throat several times before he answered to the rose petals, "Hidden bugs. Cameras."

"Right, my boy. So did you think," the president asked, "that our city doesn't have the same amount of surveillance as your district, if not more?" Haymitch was silent, and Coriolanus explained, "Your title as victor entails that you represent the Capitol's power to your district. Your inattentiveness concerning this role, proven with public discussion about victor transactions, will not go unpunished any longer."

At that, Haymitch stilled, blanched. While he had quietly dissented the Capitol's control before his Hunger Games, as a victor his actions mattered enough to be monitored. Since the rebellious finale of the Quarter Quell, Haymitch had not been compliant, not at all. The president might know of his next move in their game of chess.

* * * STANDARD RULES IN CHESS * * *

Plan out your moves.

Think like your opponent.

Think ahead.

"I understand. It won't happen again, sir."

"Be sure to pass my warning onto the other victors. Then it won't happen again."

"I will." He knew the real lesson to be learned was to stay in his place and not forget where it was.

President Snow stared steadily at Haymitch over his hands folded against his chin, forearms triangled on the desk. Then they flickered and slid to Marana.

"My dear Miss Shingott, if my earlier offer did not persuade you, perhaps this might."

Already persuaded, Marana whimpered, "What?"

The president unclasped a hand and extended it to Haymitch. "If you do not submit, you will follow Mister Abernathy's example."

Marana frowned at both of them. Through all of her contradicting emotions, the one that leapt at me was _she wanted to go home_.

Relishing her confusion, the president commanded Haymitch to explain, and he did. He found the words describing the executions of Cory, Mollie, Rayan were rather painless if he ignored the ice that screamed and threatened to rip from his stomach. His throat had not swelled shut again.

"Of course, they were listed for extortion," Coriolanus added for him. "But without them, Mister Abernathy is not up for sale, however popular he'd be."

Haymitch stared at the leader of Panem before succumbing to the power play. "Yeah, it's all my fault," he told Marana without looking at her, and he believed it was _so true._ They were sent to the president's mansion at the same time for a reason. "Do what he says, don't end up like me. Please, _please_ don't end up like me."

President Snow smiled.

Marana rasped, breathless, "I - I won't. I'll do what you say, sir - _please_."

* * * PLEASE * * *

What a word,

used when completely at the mercy of another

or asking for a casual favor.

President Snow nodded. "I'm glad we've all come to an agreement. Miss Shingott, you'll receive directions to your first sponsor tonight. Otho Creaton is a good friend of mine. He is looking forward to meeting you." Glancing at Marana, then Haymitch, he dismissed them.

They obeyed, as did I. I ambled out of his office with the Avox in my grasp. I was not executed for eavesdropping.

The cab ride to the Training Center was almost worse than the conference, as there were no words but thousands of thoughts.

Their cabdriver mentioned turning up the volume on his dashboard screen, where children continued to slaughter other children, unaware of what winning actually meant, what a life without work in the districts entailed in the Capitol. Neither victor replied.

Stephan stood under the entrance, face and arms folded. Marana swept passed him but she wasn't whom he worried for. "Are you-?"

"No."

"You're sure?"

"Yes." Haymitch scanned the street and murmured, "Why is Sear still alive? Why were all of my friends spared if they're not going to be held over me to-?" His voice broke. He looked up.

"I don't know," answered his mentor. "Here isn't the place to discuss this." Haymitch already knew that. He should have known better.

They entered the building and saw Chaff and Zane rocking the lobby chairs with their drunken laughter. Chaff motioned for Haymitch. "Be a dear and pass me that bottle by your feet. This little whore," he knuckled Zane's skull as the word singed onto Haymitch's skin because _Marana_ , "dropped it."

"Shut up, you crippled bastard!" Zane joked back, pushing him off his seat.

Neither Capitol device took offense since they were inebriated, but somewhere in their eyes the truth rang a somber toll.

* * * A POST-WAR EXCHANGE * * *

"What will you miss most, about the Capitol?"

Haymitch did not hesitate. "My friends."

"And the least, besides the Games?"

"The victors."

There was a difference, apparently.

They were miserable, but at the very least they were company.


	12. The Paper Windows

Another miner too old for work died several days after the fifty-second victor was crowned, during a handful of second-story revelations in the Donners' sweetshop.

I came upon the corpse propped up against the side of the sweetshop: something awful next to something sweet. Do you humans try to die ironically?

I was early yet again. He was still breathing, a sucking wheeze and then a hacking cough each time. His lungs were two sacks of coal dust. I pried him away from his filthy remains as it would have been a waste of time to wait any longer.

There was an eclipse, and the sky was a dusty pink.

* * * HAYMITCH ABERNATHY'S REVELATIONS AND A REINFORCEMENT * * *

Even twins were different.

School photos could be more than embarrassing.

Everything had a price.

Snow was, directly and indirectly, an evil bastard.

Lauren Donner had looked up from flossing a thread under her thumbnail when the bell above the entrance jingled. She sighed at her dead sister's ally - he took two years later than she expected to finally visit - before leading him upstairs and brewing him tea in the kitchen.

As he waited, Haymitch had a bit too much fun gripping the curved hips of the barstool and swiveling; Lauren warned, "Don't stick your hands underneath unless you want them sliced open."

His seat pivoted once more and then stilled. "Sorry," said the eighteen-year-old victor, sheepishly. "Never sat on one of these before."

"They don't have them in the Capitol?" Her voice was a page turn, crisp and cutting.

Haymitch shrugged but a scowl loomed upon him features. "Not that I know of."

* * * A REMINDER OF THE SOUL IN MY GRASP * * *

Two sachets of black grinds dripped onto ceramic saucers.

"You look tired," she commented.

Her guest raised a black brow, lowered a spoon to stir his honeyed tea, and returned, "So do you. Are you still good at dancing?"

"I haven't danced since the Victory Festival." Said festival would be playing on every television within that month for Wiress Lemelle in District Three. The slight, pale, dark-haired young lady would watch the party with no plans of joining, looking exhausted as well.

"You could be awful now. We'll never know, and maybe it's better that way." Haymitch offered her a half-smile.

The Town girl nodded and, after the victor took a sip of tea, blurted out, "I wish you would've danced. The festival was for you, after all."

"Those Capitol fire dancers got bored and boring after a few hours," replied Haymitch, "and they were professional entertainment. I don't care for music enough to willingly make an ass of myself on television, anyway." Besides, none of his usual dance partners were alive nor speaking to him.

From her expression, she was not convinced. "Weren't you in plays?"

"Only because my mother made me. That doesn't mean anything."

"I bet it does." Wearing a silly expression, Lauren disappeared into what Haymitch recognized as the bedroom Maysilee and some of her friends climbed out of, into Adam Bluet's. She returned with a thin book in her hands. Written in silver was the school year prior to the fiftieth reaping. "There's got to be a picture in here from your last play."

Of course the Donner sisters had yearbooks; they could afford them. Sitting next to him at a comfortably unclose distance, one of them cracked open the shiny coal-black cover and flipped through pages of Town-capped and Seam-blotched faces.

"There you are, right next to Harleigh. It was a musical two years ago, Haymitch Abernathy listed as the supporting role as the beggar with the squeaky voice." When she smiled, triumphant, Haymitch was numbly reminded of a Seam girl and an eastward sunset, but then the blonde girl curled into herself like burning parchment. "So, um, you could have joined in and done fine."

"I had a lot on my mind at the time," the victor replied, frowning at his ridiculous pose backstage with other cast mates, including ex-friend Artie Everdeen. Taken before his Hunger Games orphaned him, his wild paper grin would have split the faded yet _still there_ seams on his second life face.

From Lauren's own withered, sleep-deprived face, she must have understood. She herself had drawn the curtains after the showstoppers' separation and, later, the executions outside in the Town Square. Still, "A little fun might have helped that. Too late now, of course."

"Of course," Haymitch echoed dryly. He turned pages until the class above him stared up at him. Agatha Clarke caught his eye, then an identical set of golden waves and blue eyes caught his breath. "What was she like?"

"You knew her," mumbled her sister, nibbling at her scarlet bottom lip.

"Only while we both faced imminent death. I don't know any normal things," said Haymitch, "like her favorite color."

Lauren answered red, like the matching pair of lips that smiled at them, side by side from their little windows. "Really?" While his face grimaced, teasing, his eyes brightened. Her favorite color was _red_. "I thought it'd be blue. See, I needed to know that."

The surviving Donner twin rolled her eyes. "You didn't _need_ to."

"Well, it's better than not knowing anything about someone I relive dying every night," snapped the young man.

Her stunned reaction was his first revelation.

A lock had strayed from her braid, crashing against her nose. She hurriedly tucked it behind her ear, self-conscious. The single wisp out of place and the bloated cerulean eyes made her so different from Maysilee - meek and frail compared to Maysilee's pluckiness and fierce yet tactful attitude.

They weren't the same and that, of course, wouldn't change just because he was there.

Haymitch's second revelation occurred as he glared at the younger, fresher paper version of the frowning girl that sat next to him, and her mirror image. Without the riches he had now, Haymitch never purchased a yearbook while he was in school. Yet Maysilee's picture seemed so familiar. "Wait, they - they use these!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Get last year's yearbook," he commanded, and she obeyed, unsettled but not nearly as much as her guest. The carpet muting his somewhat measured footfalls, Haymitch tore through the pages until Agatha beamed up at him from her last window ever. As he recalled shrieking at that exact image when it declared her elimination, he whispered, "They use school photos for the ones in the arena. The dead tributes' faces that are projected onto the sky - these are them. I wouldn't have noticed because mine wasn't up there and I only would have seen it during my training score but I never had yearbooks and-" He raked his fingers through his dark curls, hyperventilating.

All the faces he saw against a starry cobalt sky became twice as haunting.

Maysilee's sister looped an arm around his shuddering frame. "Haymitch, it's all right. It's all right." Her soft words embarrassed him and he glared away from her, tears brimming on his eyelashes.

From the mouth of a virulent boy, "You're supposed to be upset! That's your sister and they used something from back when she was happy to show she was dead!"

"So what?" Lauren shrugged yet her throaty voice betrayed her. "It's done with now."

"No, it's not! You know it's not," Haymitch exclaimed. "They're still using them for tributes. It's another mind game for district partners in the arena _and_ the districts."

"What can we do about it? Even if anyone has noticed, it's not like they're going to care enough to change anything."

"Well, they should. You'd think they would, that they'd understand."

"Your mistake," the Donner girl smiled sadly. "Nobody wants to understand the Games. When we do, somehow we're outcasts for it." She shifted in her seat. "You know, everyone left me once she died. My parents can barely speak to each other, let alone look at me. Our friends were really always hers. They tolerated me because Maysilee and I were inseparable. Without her," she exhaled, "there's nothing that keeps us together. They just don't want to accept anything, and that hurts us more than facing her death together would've been. Somehow I even believe it hurts worse than her death."

"It hurts more because they chose to leave you." The third revelation chilled his stomach so painfully he gasped, "I - _I have to go_."

Her murmurs of protest stopped his struggle. Haymitch Abernathy faced the mirror image of Maysilee Donner. She was _not_ his ally, not at all, but he brushed away her words before they slid down from her bloody scarlet lips.

They kissed, and the sky blushed for them. It had florid cheeks and light yellow bangs.

"That's for not dancing," he told her.

As he hurried outside the sweetshop, the victor glanced at a coal dust-encrusted man whose soul I held, causing him to bump into another body.

"Sint."

"Oh, sorry," a Seam girl, about thirteen, muttered to their boots. She groped her pocket, blanched. "Oh! Oh, no. No, no, no..." She scanned the ground in the twilight.

"What are you doing out this late? Do your parents know-?" Haymitch stopped himself when a shaft of light spilled onto the cobblestone from a building behind her.

Slurring, Head Peacekeeper Cray shouted, "Hey, wait, girl! Your money."

The smell of sex wafted towards Haymitch, not from Cray but Sint. "Um, never mind. None of my business."

"Yeah." She trudged back to the Head and apologized, of all things, "I must've left it on the… Yeah. I'm sorry." Coins were exchanged for an earlier service.

Haymitch ran for the Victor's Village then, the Capitol converging onto him from all sides.


	13. Tag, I'm Still It

As fate would have it, a syringe needle had just pricked through eggshell skin and was about to inject morphling into a sickly blue vein when Haymitch Abernathy arrived at his mentor's house.

* * * FATE * * *

A rather ridiculous aspect of humanity

that can save a human in the chaos of war

and wed another to calamity.

Calamity's bridegroom at that moment growled in frustration. "Stephan, don't get all hazy on me yet; I need to tell you something."

The older victor hissed a curse as the syringe slid out. He battled the puncture, a small bead of blood that kept ebbing from his skin after he wiped it away. His eyes sagged in desperation. His identity was stained with failed mentor.

A week before, he and Haymitch had apologized to the two grieving families. It was the beginning of a long, miserable career for Haymitch, and, unknowingly, the end of Stephan's.

His only returned tribute said, "Snow had a reason for not killing-"

With impeccable speed considering his age, Stephan slapped a hand over the boy's mouth and roughly led him out of the house. The Capitol had heard, anyway.

On the nameless road between the Victors' Village and Town, Haymitch broke away, sputtering, "What the _hell?_ "

"Didn't the president enlighten your big mouth and your small brain on spouting conspiracies?" spat Stephan. "Our houses are full of surveillance."

Haymitch shrugged in apathy. "Doesn't matter. I don't care if those bastards can hear me now; they've heard me before. I hate them." He paused, liking the aftertaste of that on his tongue. He'd known what uncensored hate was supposed to taste like but never experienced the flavor itself until that night. "I _hate_ them. _I hate them!_ "

"It took a Quarter Quell and two years of mentoring to realize that," noted Stephan, wryly. He was irritable, almost Haymitch-like, when he needed morphling. His usually controlled rough accent permeated his words under the streetlights. "You were saying, other than despising the Capitol?"

Haymitch theorized in a low voice, "Snow knew everyone would leave, that their choice would be worse than just killing them." He grimaced, then met creased blue eyes. "That came out wrong, like I'd prefer them dead. I don't."

"Then you should be happy; your friends are alive and so are you," said Stephan.

Haymitch crossed his arms. "But I don't understand his motive. I mean, why _wouldn't_ he use them against me?"

"He is, just in a different way," his mentor replied. He'd done some thinking since that same question in the Capitol. "To use them in the way you'd prefer would acknowledge that they are loved ones you're allowed to have. We know what your punishment was, and now they're his reminder to you. I'm sorry, Haymitch, but Snow's made it perfectly clear you're not allowed attachments."

"What about you and the other victors?"

"I don't know," Stephan answered, his expression so honest, so dark, so pale.

A muscle in the younger man's jaw twitched. "My uncle - what about him?"

Stephan hesitated. "I suspected his position in the mines kept him alive. Perhaps the president thought he'd be helpful, too. Have... you told your uncle anything Snow could use against you since you won?"

"I know Sear better than the president does," snapped Haymitch.

"So you're certain?"

"You're not?"

"Haymitch, _why else_ would Snow keep someone so close to you alive? Either he is a source or a resource to be used later. Snow might be using him to get to you."

Gray eyes rolled and lungs exhaled curtly. "I doubt Sear can gather much intelligence about me on the one day a week he isn't working. Besides, he's one of our best mining captains. If Snow can't even off the victors associated with me, he definitely won't hinder a district that barely meets its coal production quota just to teach me a lesson."

The next Quarter Quell - especially the aftermath of its finale - was in honor of that lone sentence. Haymitch's _me_ would be expanded, though. The punishment for his transgressions would extend to all the districts of Panem.

The naivety of a nation can lead to destruction, you know.

"Was that the thought process you had when you won?" In a voice akin to knees shredding on gravel, he imitated Haymitch's young twang, " _Oh, who cares if I use the forcefield to make the Gamemakers look like idiots? Surely there won't be nationwide repercussions! Why, I'm just a kid. They don't expect me to consider all the people I love who I've just endangered! It's only broadcasted everywhere in the country!_ "

"I was trying to survive!" Haymitch protested. "That's kind of what you do in the Hunger Games, in case you've forgotten."

"You were trying to humiliate the Capitol as well," argued Stephan. "Don't _ever_ underestimate what they will do to prove a point. They're known for that, in case _you've_ forgotten summers for the last fifty-two years."

"I haven't. Neither has Panem, especially when they've just remembered what rebellion feels like, what they can do."

"All this from your little stunt alone? It was a start, sure, but you didn't have enough momentum. A rebounding axe won't flare up rebellion in the districts. They'll make a fool out of you."

"It just needs time to build up. It's still something." As nonchalantly as possible, Haymitch pointed out, shrugging, "Some folks at the Hob seem to agree." His mentor's infuriated expression beseeched clarification. "Like I said, the Capitol has probably heard me before. I wasn't talking to myself."

"I hope you realize your stupidity has endangered more than you think."

Haymitch glanced down the road to the lights of Town. "Look, I'm going through with this. I won't be alone - I'll get help, with or without yours. Sear'll help me unless he's the spy you accuse him to be. I mean, what can they do to me now?"

"Please, Haymitch, just once think about everybody else who isn't in your situation. Your actions tend to kill people, not rile them up." The comment lacerated Haymitch face, reopening scars and carving new ones. Stephan landed hard in between splotches of light on the pavement, bleeding from more than a tiny puncture.

Exasperated, Haymitch yelled down to him, "Just tell me if Sear is safe and then I'll worry about the rest of blasted Panem!"

"Don't worry about Sear," Stephan urged from the pavement, desperate. "Worry about _you!_ They were going to kill you."

His stomach lurching, encased in rime, Haymitch rasped, "What?"

The old man sat up with a muffled groan and flinched as he clutched his nose. "It was going to be staged as an accident during your Victory Tour. They actually informed me ahead of time so I wouldn't harm myself trying to intervene. Wasn't that nice of them?" His bitter laugh sliced the night air.

Once the information processed, Haymitch said slowly, "It didn't happen."

Dabbing his bloodied nostrils with his shirt collar, "I practically begged, convinced them it couldn't be done without making them look responsible. They've figured out a different sort of destruction: not your life, but everything that will ever matter in it."

Haymitch shook his head in disbelief. "You knew and you stopped them." He swallowed compassion, blinked away forgiveness. "You should have let them!" He lobbed hate and sorrow with the words, and they struck his mentor like ink, or blood, with a guiltily satisfying splatter.

The night tensed, silent except for a pair of retreating footfalls on the road. Stephan listened to them fade while the president initiated a final punishment that would capture two chessmen in one move. Haymitch had unknowingly lost his turn that night when evidence of conspiracies was detected beneath streetlights of the Capitol variety.

The next shipment of medicine to arrive in the train station of District Twelve was tainted. Those who needed treatment perished that month.

* * * A ROMANTIC ASIDE * * *

Verbena Clery consoled

Artie Everdeen after his sister's death.

Artie returned the solace when

my weight had slumped her shoulders.

The daughters they bore years later

lit the kindling provided twenty-five years before.

The poisoned morphling eventually found its way into the bloodstream of a man who desired it and could afford it. There was no hesitation. Ignorance, like morphling, was bliss.

Seeing the devastation throughout his district, Haymitch disregarded their argument that silenced night and tried to warn his mentor. He wasn't fast enough. I could tell he wanted me when he realized he had lost.

The image of him kneeling, sobs racking his body while he held the spiderwebbed hand of an old man, ended the string of Stephan's visions.

His nose had not quite healed when he died.

I came upon Stephan Hendricks once his eggshell face had finally crumbled, all of it. His blue eyes remained, staring at the fragments of himself and his victor on the ground. After I saw his life, he asked, of all things, "Was Roslyn afraid?"

"Not when she was with me. Actually, she told me I had to play with her since everyone else was gone," I answered. He chuckled at the very plausible thought of his hide-and-seek partner bossing me around.

We ambled down that same nameless road in the Victors' Village. He stood under a streetlight and admitted, "I should have let them. It would have been the best for him." He referred to the young man still sprawled beside his poisoned body. "Might have even spared his family."

"If it's any consolation," I offered him, "I think you did the right thing."

"I don't suppose I will ever know now. Do you think all of it was fate?"

Admitting that I did not know, I took his hand and led him away from the manmade calamities and their numerous handsome spouses.


	14. A Miner's Retirement

I'd like to think Stephan was fairly comfortable surrounded by the biting chill of compacted soil. Coldness brought about numbness, didn't it? He could forget for good. It was a humbling thought: a victor, buried in a casket like those who had expired from disease and starvation. Every tribute would eventually die.

I am certain Haymitch dreaded the cold pressure of the wooden overcoat enough that he refused to wear it. He still shied away from me. He hated himself for fearing yet longing for both life and me.

According to his uncle, however, adapting to his relentless hell was still a major possibility.

Haymitch especially loathed the act of dragging when the corpse of Stephan Hendricks was carted off for burial. Sear had hauled humans from brattice mouths coughing smoke and hacking up miners, and he dragged Haymitch like a dead one into their house.

His hands vises on his nephew's wrists, Sear sat him down at the kitchen table and knelt. Haymitch scowled at their hands with eyes the color of coal before it disintegrated.

"Out of all the shipments Twelve gets, however meager they are, only the medicine was poisoned - _all_ of the medicine was poisoned." Wrists were released, stubble was scratched, feet paced. "What is going on?" Sear faced his nephew. "What did you two do?"

"We didn't do anything," Haymitch answered honestly. "I just mouthed off, and Stephan stopped me before I did something stupid."

The middle-aged man raised a dark brow. "Stupid? He had a broken nose when they found him."

"Stopped me from doing anything worse," repeated Haymitch, that time with a shrug. "It's over, anyway. Snow's done with me for now while I've learned my lesson. He might even kill me within now until the next Games unless this punishment will have the outcome he expects."

"Punishment? You mean Stephan?" Sear asked. Nodding, Haymitch frowned at the adjacent house outside the kitchen window. Its lights inside were still on. "And the outcome?"

Haymitch either whimpered or laughed through his nose, or both. "Like you don't know. You probably planned it with Snow over coffee."

"What the hell are you talking about?" exclaimed Sear.

"You live with me, and you still go to work, if that's even where you're going. So does he take honey or cream in his coffee? I didn't see for myself at our little meeting last month."

"I work because I'd never accept blood money from them after they took you, and you know why I need to stay here. Ignoring your disjointed logic, you honestly think the president would give me the time of day?"

Careful, Haymitch. The walls were listening.

"He certainly would if he thought you had valuable information on me."

A flushed Uncle Sear roared, "I'm your - you're my - We're all we have left! If you believe I'd betray you just to save myself, you're insane." The word hung in the air for a moment, two Seam-blotched faces blanching under it. Haymitch spared his uncle a pained glare and then returned his attention to the lit windows on Stephan's house.

"Haymitch, I…" His head shook vigorously as regret and shame set upon his features, replacing the usual scowl.

"Go. Go home."

"No! No, look, I'm sorry-"

"Just leave me alone." There would be no glaring contest that night.

"Haymitch," murmured Uncle Sear, locking his calloused hand under the boy's chin and turning it to face him. For some reason, Haymitch did not jerk his head away. Raccoon eyes stared sadly back at Sear, dry and bright. He was eighteen and all he had left was his uncle, and Rayan Abernathy had once said they were too alike for their own good. "Whatever you thought Snow was planning, he was wrong. He can't predict everything, he's just a person." Then, "He's already misjudged how much I love you."

That was when Haymitch whipped his head away. "No, he didn't. You don't," he told the man. "You don't! Damn it, say you don't!"

Uncle Sear grabbed the young victor's his shoulders while he writhed in the chair. "Of course I do! What, you actually believed all those times I pretended I didn't? I was teasing, teasing you and Cory."

"No! You don't! Please, don't, you don't!" He pushed his only family in the chest, weakly considering Sear's sallow arms overpowered him. "Damn it, Sear! Do you want to get shot like Cory - and Mother?" He ceased squirming, allowed Sear to regain a strong grip on his biceps. He gasped, shuddering, "You _can't_ love me. You just can't. It'll only get you killed. _That's_ the outcome of his plan, _that's_ the punishment. It's the same as what happened to my friends. It's what Stephan stopped me from acting on. It's why… why I can't be close with anyone. Not you or Adam or Rohan or no one."

The sky outside was no longer blushing but the memory from days before lingered, a rosy hue streaking the otherwise moonless horizon. A picturesque midnight sky, worthy of framing in a little paper window.

Uncle Sear said, "I don't care about that. You think I'm going to leave you because everyone else did?"

"Yes."

"Well, I won't." The collier smirked a little to soothe his nephew.

Haymitch was not comforted. "I want you to. That way, I'm not hurting anyone else. My... friends can keep living their lives, just without me. Shouldn't be that difficult." His lips shrugged, a twitch of his own smirk. "Do the same for yourself."

"I've nothing left but you," Sear rasped.

Haymitch clutched the man's shoulders then, forming a strange embrace between them. "Then do me a favor and just do it," he commanded through gritted teeth. "If you love me, you will. You'll stay alive and live your life out of the mines, using the money I gave you. It's blood money but it's still money. I owe it to you after everything."

Sear had not been able to meet the Seam eyes that matched his own. A single bark of a laugh swayed him, forward and back. "I'll probably outlive you, anyway, boy," he restated, because years ago he said that and years ago he took Haymitch and Cory and his sister Rayan for granted.

* * * A TRIBUTE TO SEAR, WHO OUTLIVED * * *

Years later, after hearing his

uncle had passed in his sleep,

Haymitch will hide a smile

by pressing his lips to the

mouth of a liquor bottle.

Well, it worked. Everything went according to Coriolanus Snow's plan, and his move had the desired outcome in their game of chess.

The door slam ringing throughout his house like a final gunshot, Haymitch Abernathy had lost everyone.


	15. Ghosts via Telephone

Upon the arrival of District Twelve's train for the Fifty-Third Hunger Games, Seeder Jones had Chaff Anders by the throat.

"Chaff, so help me, if you had _anything_ to do with him," she threatened.

"I didn't, I swear!" wheezed the man against the wall.

"Ah, Seeder, settle down," advised the drunken version of Haymitch Abernathy. "Not his fault. All me, not him. Ha! All my fault, like always, right?" He chortled too loudly at the invisible joke. Afterwards, gray eyes imitated molten honey ones rolling, not nearly as impatient.

At Seeder's release, Chaff slid down the wall, his legs collecting under him. He winced as he probed his neck. "Why am I always blamed for everything?"

"You've been drinking since you were crowned. You'd be the most corruptive in that department," Seeder answered curtly. She asked Haymitch, "Where are your kids?"

He shrugged. "Not sure. Bet Missy Prissy Escort does. They're probably in the Remake Center getting their skin ripped off." In the next week his male tribute will undergo that same process again, though a little more literally, by mutant insects.

Seeder's frown deepened and her dark eyebrows hitched up. "Why are you drunk, Haymitch?"

His answer was fermented grapes, tart and sour-sweet.

Seeder stepped forward and took his hand, the injured one that clutched a crying wine bottle. "This is about Stephan." Her words were soft, private, but the nineteen-year-old scowled and wrenched his fist from her grasp before shaking his head.

Seeder sighed, disappointed, while he teeter-tottered down the hall to his quarters. As she bent down to help the other inebriated victor up, a perturbed noise beckoned her towards its source.

* * * HAYMITCH'S VOICE * * *

"Hey, do any of you hear that?"

They didn't. Neither Capitol device could hear the ringing, the incessant chime of a telephone.

It happened below an evening sky the color of burnt candlewicks. The only flame in the Victors' Village was the soulless house of Stephan Hendricks. I was there, culling the diseased, mistreated souls of Twelve while their medicine for that month continued to fail.

In unlit darkness, Haymitch still sat at his kitchen table. His wrists were sore, a tender pink encircling them. _Bye, Sear._ His fingers tapped a brisk, erratic rhythm on the woodgrain. There was no one to stop him.

Outside his kitchen window and across the grass was his dead mentor's house, which was more alive than his own. He stared at its empty light for a long time.

Slowly, so slowly, he rose from his seat and left his house.

I followed him to his mentor's porch, where he twisted the doorknob and pummeled the locked entrance. The windows were unlocked, but he realized that after he smashed the glass and climbed through. His hands were lacerated.

He perceived Stephan's talent, alone in the dim bay-windowed room. Whatever light the room offered glinted off the shards of glass onto the piano. Perched on the edge of the stool, Haymitch lifted the fallboard, unveiling black and white teeth underneath. His fingers ghosted over them, incompetent and furious and wistful.

The pseudo pianist muttered, "You weren't even good, were you?" A wicked chord struck the house.

* * * STEPHAN HENDRICKS' OTHER DIVERTISSEMENT * * *

Syringes of morphling laid

untouched in their box,

only one missing.

The drudges that maintained each residence in the Victors' Village every two weeks ensured the mansion will eventually be cleared out. That night Haymitch had every intention of packing his mentor's belongings and delivering them to someplace where it could be sold, like the Hob, or where it might be needed, such as the Community Home for orphan children like him.

Instead, he ended up drunk for the first time in his eighteen-year-old life.

For a reason I can only label as _fate_ , the deceased victor kept a modest supply of alcohol in his basement. One of calamity's bridegrooms entered the cellar for cardboard boxes and resurfaced grasping two wine bottles.

Poor Stephan. He protected Haymitch from one substance addiction only to lead him to another.

The only living victor of District Twelve glared at the drinks as if asking them, _why the hell didn't he think of them before?_ The desire in his eyes was palpable.

He wanted bliss, like Stephan had, because he was no longer ignorant. When he finally succumbed to it was the time bomb.

The final gunshot, a bullet aimed at Rayan, set the clock.

The final slam of the door as the last of his family abandoned him began the countdown to self-destruction.

After uncorking a wine bottle with a knife, Haymitch downed a huge gulp and was sputtering before the taste even registered. He swore, shakily laughed at himself.

His second sip was more careful, but led to more that drained the entire bottle in under five minutes. With each dram he cursed their names. His mentor, his family, his ex-friends, his opponents in the Quell, his ally, the tribute from District One who would have been victorious if it were not for his force field stunt, his two years' worth of tributes he had failed to mentor - all dead or dead to him.

Haymitch noticed the wine had alleviated the twinge of ice in his stomach, warming it like fire.

In an attempt to rise from the ceramic tiles he had sunk to in his need for anesthetization, he could have set the bottle on the floor. That would require rational thinking, though, and at the time Haymitch did not exactly possess that. I could have helped him up as well, but he swatted my hand away, the mortal bastard. Instead, he reached up for the table with his wine-swigging hand and cracked the bottle trying to lift himself.

He fell gloriously, staccato profanity and flailing and all.

As always with Haymitch, the second effort was more successful.

He stared with an almost childish curiosity as he stood over the alcohol pooled on the table from his collapse. It resembled a blood splatter, of course. Swaying, he glanced at his glass-cut palms, then the puddle again. He watched his hands hovering above it. A drop of blood splashed into the dark crimson liquid.

His hands slammed onto the table and his screams became humorless laughter.

Drowning out his insanity, a chime. The sound was muffled but there.

* * * RING, RING * * *

Haymitch Abernathy's house

was canary-silent before

the telephone rang out.

On the stumbling journey back to his mansion, Haymitch Abernathy tripped an admirable eight times and stopped halfway to retrieve the other bottle from Stephan's kitchen. When he left his mentor's house the final time, he turned off a light, became visibly frightened and switched it back on, then scribbled a note to the caretakers.

* * * A BARELY LEGIBLE NOTE LEFT ON A DEAD MAN'S DOOR * * *

_Send anything useful to the Home,_

_get rid of anything else._

_Clean inside and maintain lawn._

_Turn off the lights before you leave._

The telephone was still ringing as he entered the study.

I sat at the desk, arms folded on the polished wood, waiting for the detonation of the human time bomb.

The spiral cord hung down from the phone box, an incomplete, unknotted noose.

The handset was cold under his feverish bloodied hand. He answered wordlessly, silencing the chime. A final echo, like a gunshot, resounded throughout the house while he promptly slipped to the floor. Straining the cable into a wavy ribbon as he leaned against the desk, Haymitch whispered, "How are you even...? Well, how are you, I guess? Dead, but-"

He listened, as did I though I heard nothing, no mumbled garble or even static. From my seat, I heard the dial tone spieling, but that was not what Haymitch heard.

He chuckled. "Love you, too, Cory-Rory. But..." he paused before sighing, which fogged up the porous plastic of the transmitter, and saying, "you're not real. I'll let you in on a little secret, kid: I'm drunk - like _really_ drunk - and you're dead. So this - you - can't be real..."

Silence, but not to Haymitch.

"Of course I remember," Haymitch frowned. "That was the worst day of my life, worse than the Quell."

Cory-Rory had said something tragically naive because his older brother shook his head and slammed his puffy eyelids shut. "No, not yours. It wasn't! Don't you dare argue with me, Cory. _It wasn't your fault_ _!_ " The reaction of his dead brother on the other line was nonexistent, yet Haymitch continued to press how he killed him and how sorry he was and how he loved him _so, so much_.

The argument lasted another minute or so, and then Haymitch jerked the phone back as if he finally noticed the dial tone. _Bye, Cory-Rory._ "Cory? Hello?" He barked a wry laugh, held out the phone receiver for examination. "Damn twerp just hung up on m-"

The phone was not in its cradle and yet it rang - for Haymitch, that is. Not knowing how to answer, Haymitch struggled against the desk to stand up and slammed the phone into its cradle, switch hooks clicking. Then, the phone flew to his ear again and he asked, "Cory?"

A long moment of nothing.

"Mollie," he murmured. His free hand yanked at his hair. "What is going on?" he cried. Mollie must have answered because Haymitch replied, "Well, it's never been like this, all of you together." His weariness was evident. "I think I'm crazy. It might be the drinking, but… - No, I just... Would you let me talk? I don't care if it's bad for me. Why should you care? You're dead. I doubt _your_ health isn't shit either."

Knowing Mollie Hannigan, I assume she verbally smacked him over the phone.

From the one half of the conversation I heard, I could comprehend what was said, and Haymitch had a point. His hellbringers never haunted him at the same time. To have all of their attention at once froze his entire being that was temporarily warmed by the wine. It scared him. Their sentimental company left him apprehensive as well because these ghosts of his loved ones would turn into the phantoms of his nightmares. He expected nothing less, deserved nothing more.

When lips kissed plastic as if it was a palm on a cheek, I read the titles of the books on the shelves around us. Haymitch was right, all those years ago - every volume was sanctimonious literature of the Capitol variety, analyzing the collapse of the human race that led to glorious Panem and speculating the districts' revolt.

_Bye, Mollie._ Haymitch started when I assume the telephone tolled a third time. "Mother, oh Mother," was mumbled innumerably, quivery sobs harmonizing the slur in his words.

I leaned back in the chair and stared at the sky through layers of plaster. Drops of waxy yellows collected at the bottom of the burnt black firmament. Dawn was approaching and Haymitch sniveled to a woman he watched helplessly watching him as she collapsed onto cobblestone, cracking and spilling wine.

The elegiac toll taunted him. _Bye, Rayan._

"Who else is there?" bellowed the drunken teenager. "I don't want -" He faltered. _What did he want?_ Could he really refuse the opportunity to speak to his family or were they merely the results of gunshots and defiant finales? Maybe he just couldn't willingly associate himself with them since the explicit fact was that they were mine.

The victor swore at the caroling machine, answered, slammed it back into the box, and repeated until reduced to a wailing pile of human on the carpet. He seemed to bow before the telephone, our pitiful fallen chessman. He rose, slightly, when the phantoms came. The black as coal phone hung down from the box, swinging by its cable.

Alas, I heard these hellbringers decades later. With voices from the loved ones before, they spoke of hatred and betrayal and _all his fault, all his fault, all his fault!_

To silence them, though he believed they were all too correct, he lunged for the machine like the murderous savage he thought he was.

I was there to witness the screeches, the grunt of effort necessary when tearing appliances in mid-ring out from walls, the tangle of wires dead on the office carpet, but I also relived the conversations with his hellbringers, unmuted, alongside Haymitch Abernathy after he had passed away.

He claimed he did not remember the rest of that night. I am so very glad.

The ringing never stopped, though, neither did the voices of the phantoms that he loved and that once loved him. They tormented him, allying with the ice. He fought back with spirits of his own.

Haymitch did not become an alcoholic overnight, however miserable that night was. Afterwards, when the dead telephone rang out and the ice in his middle screamed, he tamed it with the only thing he knew would. His psychosomatic cold worsened as summer arrived along with the next Hunger Games. Temporary alleviation was apparently worth the stark confrontation of his crimes.

The fifty-third reaping passed by in a blur, but Haymitch remembered their names, and them: the unlucky bastards and eventual losers. He never forgot his losers.

Despite his hostility during Seeder's interrogation, Haymitch found himself in the Eleven suite shortly after the opening of the Hunger Games. Chaff had been resigned of his yearly mentoring duty the day before when I held his slain tribute. Seeder was only visiting the Capitol that year. The other District Eleven victors did not matter in that moment.

A muscle in his jaw twitched and his eyes blinked rapidly while he relayed what the other two had already seen, once live and twice in slow-motion in the mutants' red bug-eyed perspective.

Seeder nodded, wordless yet thoughtful, and Chaff took a lingering drink. From its color, the liquid was most likely what the newest victor, Brutus Garnier from District Two, would be hazed into drinking.

Haymitch clung to the cushion against his stomach. He was sober for the moment and the effect of alcohol hung on his front, sagging downwards and throbbing like hell. "I can't do it without him," he said.

If he could have heard him then, Stephan Hendricks might have wept.

If Seeder Jones' hand had not been so warm, Haymitch would not have allowed it to brush his cheek. It would have reminded him too much of the cold plastic of a telephone.


	16. A Berry Sweet Victory

After the hellbringers, Haymitch Abernathy disappeared. There were no eclipses near him because there were no lives either.

Every summer I was informed by two dead children that he continued to struggle with mentoring.

At some point he stopped wearing his father's miner jacket and joined a rebellion that the Capitol itself initiated with incidents like Haymitch's spurring it on. Some victors were recruited. Among them were close friends of Haymitch.

Over the years, the grief, what began as a dull, cold ache, had concentrated into a biting line across his middle. Sometimes in the slow, heavy moments before a drunken stupor Haymitch would hike up his shirt and scratch at the invisible stitch, trying to find the fastenings of his wound from the arena that were burnished afterward. Instead his nails sunk into soft skin, an inevitable result of middle age.

His drinking worsened in the race to warm the psychosomatic ice, considering his condition when the boy and girl on fire came along.

You should also know that he did not question things anymore - only expected them, dreaded them. His attitude on everything was to shrug his thoughts like his shoulders and take a long pull from his flask.

When Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark realized that, they became the only tributes under Haymitch to dare to reanimate him.

I had met them both several times prior to their deaths, Katniss even before her Hunger Games career and Peeta Mellark twice in his.

* * * KATNISS EVERDEEN * * *

A black plait swung across her back as she strode,

always forward and determined.

Her face seemed forever pinched into a scowl,

lips naturally pouted and eyes unnaturally guarded.

Her calloused hands remained curled at her sides

as if they had nocked an arrow too many.

Her voice was like that of her father,

one of the songbird and the wood.

My first encounter with Katniss was very familiar, though she had worn a faded belted dress rather than a blackened waxcoat jacket.

I had passed by the Justice Building with a crew of burnt miners, on our way to the congregating January clouds, when a little girl broke away from her mother and sister, both Town-capped, to receive the Medal of Valor. While the girl was Seam, she closely resembled her mother, whom I recognized all those years ago as Verbena.

Artie Everdeen extended his hand, reaching for them, and I gently pulled it back. "Katniss and Primrose," Artie informed me of his daughters' names. Even apart from his body, his voice sang.

A teenage boy followed after Katniss, then held the hand of his pregnant mother when he returned to her and his younger siblings with the plaque. The pregnant widow was once Miss Hazelle Monalow and a friend of Haymitch, as was Artie. Comparing her son to one of the miners, I realized he looked exactly like Rohan Hawthorne, another ex-friend.

How peculiar.

"His name's Gale," Rohan had told me, proud and dead. "You won't meet him for a very long time."

"I hope so," I replied, smiling. He was almost right.

The second encounter was months before the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games.

Outside District Twelve's still-lapsing electric fence, two fugitives were captured. A young lady cried out as an older boy was harpooned. I pulled the weapon out from between his shoulder blades before a net emerged from the underbelly of the hovercraft and dragged the girl inside with the lifeless boy.

All the while, the daughter of Artie Everdeen had hid with the son of Rohan Hawthorne in the undergrowth. They watched and waited for the Capitol to leave their little haven. When the forest resurrected, they raised their longbows, shifted their satchels stuffed with herbs and wildflowers and gutted squirrel carcasses. They resumed surviving.

That year's reaping, the Capitol escort read aloud, "Primrose Everdeen!"

All of Panem watched Katniss volunteer for her little sister.

They also watched their only living victor stagger forward and throw his arm around her shoulders. "Look at her!" cackled Haymitch while Gale Hawthorne carried Primrose back to her bent, crying mother. "Lots of... spunk!" He grinned toward a camera with the seal of Panem attached to it, inebriation having numbed his strained laceration scars. Hand wavering, he pointed at the camera marked as the president's private view. "More than you! _More than you_ -!" As the drunkard tumbled off the stage, headfirst, the crowd let out a collective sigh, either relieved he had stopped making a fool of himself and their district or disappointed that they did not hear the rest of his censure.

In a show of respect and defiance, the people of Twelve touched their fingers to their lips and held them out to the volunteer onstage.

Yes, she was indeed the showstopper the districts needed.

The Capitol woman hurriedly plucked another slip and called out the name of the male tribute. She was like me, culling and delivering the dead. The differences were that I liked Haymitch and she didn't, and I have never worn a pink wig. Did she herself need a name to those people? No, but it was Effie Trinket.

Peeta Mellark almost tripped on the fourth step from the bottom climbing up to the stage. Shaking hands with his district partner, he visibly gulped and squeezed her hand. Katniss raised a brow before she focused her attention on the dreary audience.

Their mentor, a showstopper once himself, met them both on the train that evening, vomiting and then collapsing. He came to with a shudder right when a shower faucet coughed, bringing warm rain.

A damp towel clumsily wiped at his mouth. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Just cleaning you up. I'm, um, Peeta Mellark," answered a boyish voice. The bathroom lights were _so damn bright_ ; even squinting he could not see the words' owner.

"Well," Haymitch drawled up at the figure, fulfilling his annual duty of leaving bad first impressions, "if you don't mind, _Peeta Mellark,_ I'll clean myself, thanks." He grimaced as he touched the knot under his black curls, which were soaked with water and stomach contents.

"Yes, sir." The voice sounded grateful.

* * * PEETA MELLARK * * *

Flaxen hair hung in front of his Town blue eyes,

and a button nose underwhelmed his face.

He had the bearing of a short, squat flower,

the arms of a worker - a baker to be exact,

and a comely yet bashful smile that a nation,

a girl, and a chessman grew to love.

On a string that drooped in the middle were Haymitch Abernathy's memories: lacerated, grimy, and beautiful, drenched in alcohol and brine. One literally, despite said metaphorical string, outshone them.

Blazing through the streets of the Capitol towards the Training Center were a boy and a girl on fire. Their contenders also paraded in their costumes, but none held a candle to District Twelve, especially when they themselves were torches. With capes and crowns of fire and coal-black suits, Katniss and Peeta were tributes - _pawns -_ ready to unknowingly set a nation aflame with rebellion.

* * * FOR FUTURE REFERENCE * * *

Coal is useful as it burns,

but then it disintegrates.

Their flames, projected on all the screens, flickered off Haymitch's face. Chaff stood beside him, his dark, pockmarked features awash with amazement.

"Better get your sponsors ready," advised the District Eleven victor. He jerked his chin in the direction of a cheering group of bird people. A playful shove followed.

Shoving back, Haymitch said, "Aren't you coming along? You've got a fighter this year."

"But he's not _on fire_ at the moment." Chaff grinned, Haymitch smirked, and that was them. "I'll go later when my boy really gets attention - after training scores and that."

Haymitch decided years ago that he would more than tolerate Chaff Anders when the older man had told him over lip-stained glasses and misery, "You know, I've got a ma and pops back home, and a sister, and a wife. Used to have a little brother, too, but I refused the ultimatum the first time around - just like their damn prosthetic - and, well, I feel for you. I do."

Of course, such moments happened, never to be forgotten, and yet never spoken of again. Such were the memories of the Capitol devices.

A gong announced the start of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games, and Haymitch felt a hand grab his own. The eyes of Effie Trinket were a sparkling dark blue, false as her eyelashes. He wrenched away, grumbling something about her pointed acrylic fingernails.

They both stared through the screen, into the forested arena, at the tribute grappling with Peeta Mellark.

* * * FOR LIFE AND A KNIFE * * *

The charming Town boy,

who had publicly declared his unrequited love

for Katniss the night before,

sat on the chest of a District Four male tribute

and strangled him,

thumbs overlapped on his neck,

clenching.

After sunset, at last, the Hunger Games cut to Capitol commercials so the portraits of the eliminated could be shown. One advertised a hit gossip show, showing celebrities, politicians, and even victors.

Finnick Odair flashed upon the screen showing what was broadcasted. According to the glitzy show host, the victor was seen _last night with Gamemaker Aegidius Bernstone!_ The host inquired aloud if their possible fling could enhance the odds of the District Four tributes' favor.

"Considering his kid just died a couple hours ago, I doubt it," muttered Haymitch. Effie, fully engrossed in the commercial, shushed him. He left the Control Room for coffee.

They, along with some other mentors and escorts, had barely exhaled throughout the entire first day - only a sharp inhale, never a release. They inflated. Those who left when the canons fired a dozen times were deflated.

Katniss' first alliance in the arena was not Peeta. Rue of Eleven was a bird in her own way, a small, dark one that flitted between branches because the canopy was too open and the ground too dangerous. Together they dropped a nest of mutant wasps on some tributes and then blew up all of their food - just two pawns surviving the Games.

A young man from One ensnared Rue and speared her in the stomach, just under her wings. Katniss shot him through the neck.

While his Seam eyes reflected her dying ally, Haymitch only thought of his, Maysilee Donner, and how he could not rescue her from me as well. As Effie sniffled beside him, he realized his throat had tightened, though he was not sure whom it was for.

When I collected the District One tribute, he was flat on his back, knees folded under him. I helped him up and he frowned at the hovercraft above us, the leaden sky rimmed around it.

Rue had vibrant wildflowers in her black hair and tiny hands. She kept them and hummed her final lullaby Katniss had sung as the three of us walked on. Her ally sobbed nearby.

That evening, an announcement declared two victors could win if they were district partners.

Immersed in a riverbank, Peeta smiled.

Perched high in a tree facing south, Katniss called his name.

Swivelling idly in his chair, Haymitch closed his eyes and breathed - in and out. _Please._

I officially met Peeta shortly after, his hair speckled with mud and blood. A tear in his pantleg revealed a rather infected gash. Katniss mopped up the pus, blood, and other fluids, looking as nauseous than Peeta. His eyes fluttered shut for a moment, and his breathing stilled. I reached for him.

Katniss stroked his cheek and then shook his shoulder, brushing me off. "Hey," she called, not knowing it was a greeting. "You awake?"

Peeta hoarsely replied, "Yeah, I'm awake."

The twenty-two souls collected during those Games were the usual intolerable. One had not yet fallen to the ground when her canon fired. Her hands and lips were stained dark with berries. Her demise was held in her slackened fingers.

* * * THE GAMEMAKER GUIDE: NIGHTLOCK * * *

A fatal combination

of nightshade and hemlock.

Sown in forested arenas,

first appearing in the

Second Quarter Quell.

Katniss scooped them into a pouch, an action that determined the outcome of the second civil war.

Mutant wolves surrounded the three remaining tributes at the Cornucopia. A colossal boy from Two I had already gotten to know through his victims, including Chaff's fighter, kept Peeta in a chokehold while Katniss' arrow aimed for his forehead: a stalemate. Peeta painted a bloody _X_ on the back of his assailant's hand. Her arrow hit the target with a muted _squelch_. The District Two tribute howled like the wolves circling the golden statue beneath them, and soon met them after Peeta shoved him off the Cornucopia.

Because of a weak _please,_ an arrow from Katniss Everdeen's quiver found its temporary home in his skull.

I pulled the boy to his feet, to his defeat. "Whatever. They damn well deserve to go home together," he said.

Shrieking, the Capitol woman impulsively kissed Haymitch on the cheek and danced in her swivel chair. Haymitch slouched, dumbstruck, gawking at the screen, at Katniss and Peeta, his not-losers, _his victors._ He might have smiled.

Then, a booming voice negated the earlier announcement. Rules were rules: there could only be one victor.

"No," croaked their mentor, maybe all of Panem. His bloodshot eyes stung hotly around the rims. The victors gathered in his Control Room murmured dissent.

Another announcement frantically apologized for the previous one just as the nightlock berries teasingly kissed the lips of Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark.

I present to you the star-crossed victors of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games. Victory is sweet, isn't it? Sweet as berries.

The train ride back to Twelve was quiet.

In the chess game, Haymitch had only checked the president using his two pawns, and that was why he worried. His opening move was not a checkmate either, as impossible as that was, and it had cost him his loved ones. No doubt the president was angered by his champions. Haymitch could only wait for his reciprocating maneuver.

While the rebellion stirred the country, ardent yet uneasy, life happened for Haymitch Abernathy.

In the year after the double victory to the Third Quarter Quell, as either fellow victor sat next to him, _with him_ , Haymitch grudgingly decided he liked the new company of Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, no matter how virulent he was to them on many, many occasions.

Those children woke him up.


	17. Laurels Can Slip

"Not bad, for a beginner," Haymitch Abernathy admired, sliding his queen piece forward several squares into battle.

Peeta Mellark twisted his knight piece, the horse head twirling clumsily in its place. "Actually, I learned when I was nine," he admitted with a sheepish wince. "My brother taught me and my friend Delly."

"Oh. Well, then you're all kinds of horrible."

"Thank you, Haymitch. I'm so honored to be graced by your judgment." Peeta's voice had sarcastic parentheses, the way his eyebrows were curved up too earnestly. It's possible to be aggressive when steering a chessman.

As he captured Peeta's castle Haymitch told him, "Maybe your brother was just a bad teacher. We, _capable mentors_ , are a rarity."

Peeta snorted. "So who taught you, my enlightened guide and guardian?"

"My mentor, actually," answered Haymitch, his tone indicating the end of whatever conversation the mention of Stephan Hendricks would prompt. "I'll reteach you, if you want. I'm sure you can't sleep at night knowing you're dreadful at chess."

"Yes, _that's_ the reason." Together they laughed a sad, understanding laugh. Their wooden rockers creaked, _what was that?_ almost in unison and were ignored.

Primrose Everdeen glanced out the window and unfolded herself from the armchair by the hearth. "Katniss is back."

"Showtime," Haymitch muttered as the Peacekeepers rose from the Everdeen family's kitchen chairs to confront the huntress.

Katniss had kept her boots on. Slushy footprints led from the foyer to the kitchen, then over to Peeta. Their kiss was for the Peacekeepers, an uneasy collision of chapped lips. They only kissed on camera those days.

I was somewhat near as Katniss avoided arrest for poaching by concocting an alibi the others had to support in its false authenticity. Outside the Victors' Village, in the center of the Town Square, the torture equipment had made a reappearance. The electric fence was charged at all times, never lapsing. A new Head Peacekeeper was appointed. None of the District Twelve denizens knew what became of Cray. I did.

The newest Head Peacekeeper was Romulus Thread, a man who took too much pleasure in his job. Think the opposite of me - Romulus was that. His head never tilted up towards the sky, but down into the scared, guilty depths of criminals. He was cinderblock hair and muscles, only pupils for eyes. Those eyes watched the Hob ignite, burn.

Those who were sentenced to execution, abuse, or humiliation committed crimes long overdue in sanctions.

* * * SOME EXAMPLES * * *

There was a shudder, and

the gambler's detached head stared

as I unscrewed him from his torso

splayed out upon a guillotine.

Another eclipse followed,

with gravity and a _crack,_  


and the child I carried away replaced

two stolen apples in the grocery stand.

Meanwhile, an alcohol supplier

watched from the stocks,

hands level to her eyes.

At one of the flogging posts, a switch whistled and tore into an insolvent's back, finally bringing her to Capitol justice. Weather washed the gore off the cobblestone like it was part of the procedure, but the blood soaked into the wooden post.

Some of the recent stains belonged to Gale Hawthorne.

He had held my stare while his back was rendered a slab of mangled flesh. His Seam eyes pleaded with me and then rolled back toward his hairline as he lost consciousness.

He _had_ been whipped for poaching. Some victors and mining crew mates had carried him to the Everdeen household. Haymitch was the first to step up, fortunately yet unfortunately knowing what to do. Unlike Katniss, he and Gale did not have a team of actors to aid them, but a band of collectors who left before they endangered themselves.

Soon to follow the reappearance of the harsh authority was one of said collectors, Hazelle Hawthorne. She featured as Haymitch's housemaid, and from little I saw of either of them during those months, cleaned his past and ignored him in the present.

Katniss swung her bag from her shoulder and dumped its contents onto the kitchen table. What would have been illegal game several hours ago were bandages and supplies for her mother from the Town apothecary.

A female officer interrogated her still. Obviously she was new to Twelve but experienced in law and victim terrorization enforcing. The Peacekeepers under Cray were replaced. They could have been demoted but there was no relegation lower than duty in Twelve.

The Peacekeepers left with the testimony inside laughing behind them, scratching at their heels, burning into their backs. The official who had demanded Katniss Everdeen's arrest was not going to be pleased with their lack of detentions.

Katniss slumped against her district partner, or her onscreen lover, but held onto the forearm of her mentor. She allowed her mother to probe and assess her injuries.

Her ankle was deemed broken, her ass bruised, and the slash across her cheek from intervening in Gale's flogging had barely healed. Yet in several weeks she posed for winking cameras in oversized wedding gowns. Apparently she and Peeta were engaged and the Capitol was pretending to care. They were certainly more eager than the bride- and the groom-to-be and their proud, drunken matchmaker, a bridegroom himself. In all honesty, they wanted to air the giddiness and hope, love and fashion, lace and glitter prior to the reading of the next Quarter Quell: the Seventy-Fifth Hunger Games.

President Coriolanus Snow began the program with a speech reminding his country of the districts' failed attempt at rebellion that, as penance, established the Hunger Games. The purpose of the Quarter Quell, the Hunger Games anniversary special held every twenty-five years, was to _refresh the memory of failure and the credence of how all are inferior to their Capitol._

He paused, his composure broadcasted to every television screen across the nation, and recapitulated each of the previous Quarter Quells.

"On the twenty-fifth anniversary, as a reminder to the rebels that their children were dying because of their choice to initiate violence, every district was made to hold an election and vote on the tributes who would represent it." It was the only democracy Panem had in ages, which was what the rebels had fought for, and that year they finally had the privilege. I remember those tributes. They were either older and stronger than their district's usual or crippled, handicapped, and diseased. Humans are more practical than I thought about whom they select to die. Perhaps they're trainable.

Veronica Fuller, the victor of the First Quarter Quell, had rambled unintelligibly during her dying visions and listed her sins after them, but I shushed her, and off we went.

"On the fiftieth anniversary, as a reminder that two rebels died for each Capitol citizen," the president continued, and Haymitch swore his lips twitched when he said, "every district was required to send twice as many tributes."

The victor of the Second Quarter Quell visibly shuddered, or maybe even shivered, searching for my face in the shadows.

Smiling, President Snow patted a boy on the back of his white suit jacket as he accepted the card the child bore. He read aloud, "On the seventy-fifth anniversary, as a reminder to the rebels that even the strongest among them cannot overcome the power of the Capitol, the male and female tributes will be reaped from their existing pool of victors."

Then there was a dreadful moment where he stared into the camera at every victor, rebel, and human, who all assumed his words were directed at _only them_ , daring them to rebel.

* * * A PROMISE FOLLOWING THE ANNOUNCEMENT * * *

"Well, Mister President,

we've captured enough

pawns. Time to pull in the

knights and castles, huh?

I'm not done playing yet, sir.

If anything, you've pulled me

back into the game."

As one of his last two pawns crashed into his foyer and begged him to help save the other's life, Haymitch had broken the seal on a bottle amidst a familiar, ominous chime. He regretted having the damn phone fixed after he brought home winners, although there was a possibility it was actually ringing and not one of his phantoms calling to tell him the Quell was yet another warning to him, _watch out_.

"Let me go, Haymitch," implored Peeta Mellark, slapping the table at each word. "You're more valuable as our mentor than as a tribute - more than me, anyway. You owe me that much after picking Katniss over me to live the last time."

Wincing, "I know." Had Haymitch even said he planned to go back in himself? To protect them, he believed he would.

"We're going to keep her alive again, you hear me?"

"Yeah."

"Promise me!" Haymitch promised.

Later, Katniss glared at him through a haze of drink. "If it is Peeta and me in the Games, this time we try to keep _him_ alive." After his response, a flinch, she continued to persuade him. "And whatever Peeta wants, it's his turn to be saved. We both owe him that. Besides, the Capitol hates me so much, I'm as good as dead now." But Katniss had to live, and Haymitch knew that. He had orders to keep the symbol of rebellion alive, no matter the cost. Peeta was a pawn, but Katniss might as well have been a king piece in the chess game of war. "He still might have a chance. Please, Haymitch, say you'll help me."

Haymitch scowled into the shiny rim of his bottle. "All right."

He drank and schemed with Peeta and then Katniss, lies flying out as liquor droplets that permeated his pink cranial matter, commas swigged from a bottle.

Though it was years before I wrote about it, a brilliant mind was dusted off that night, the spine creaking as the pages were ruffled for the first time in ages, the ink long dry but the letters still full of genius, while I culled four other victors. They adapted to their new hell on earth rather quickly because they knew their laurels had withered and losing publicly was just not an option.

*

Seventy-six victors were eligible for the Seventy-Fifth Hunger Games. Of course, many were mine or going to be mine, but only the former had been excused from the event.

However stooped or towering they were, each and every one of them had stood on their Capitol pedestals, celebrities to the Capitol citizens and messages to the districts. When they were herded into sections assigned by gender instead of the stage on reaping day, the message was apparent, grim like the chains on their laurels.

As their names were called a second time, their fear was heightened from past experience. Many had muffled their terror but others released it in the form of brine or sounds that punctured the indifferent firmament above. Neither changed the ink on the paper slips.

I could not comfort them. In time, I would. Although it was useless, I caressed the owners of the names on the slips, and the names touched me back.

As the only female victor from District Twelve, Katniss Everdeen was reaped.

Then, "Haymitch Abernathy." He was not sixteen, but forty-one years old in that moment. Still, Haymitch swallowed back bile around whatever was lodged in his throat - his heart, maybe, but certainly not his stomach where the ice stabbed and twisted.

Both times, Effie Trinket had no inflection in her voice. I didn't understand; she had grabbed the man's hand at the start of the Games the year before and kissed his cheek at the end, under the illusion that the Gamemakers would break their own rules for the sake of a young couple tragically in love. A year later, her champions took the place of the children she usually culled. Yet her voice did not waver.

She stood and watched and held her tongue as Peeta Mellark hurried to replace Haymitch.

Everything was going according to plan.

While they were in the Capitol, as tributes again rather than as mentors, victors told Haymitch of their involvement in the rebellion by making _his little winners_ feel like the newcomers they were. Considering those signals were in their final visions, I assume they had too much fun obliging.

Finnick Odair of District Four was fourteen when he speared the second to last tribute using a golden trident, sixteen when he was officially sold to patrons, and, at twenty-four, old enough to serve the revolution by attempting to ally with Katniss Everdeen.

* * * FINNICK ODAIR, VICTOR * * *

Sun-kissed skin and bronze hair

flecked with blood,

he hummed to nobody while

he wove a net from vines

to hunt down his opponents.

Tributes were fish in a barrel,

except the shooter standing over them

gave one guppy a trident

and watched.

Not an hour after Finnick's flirtation, Chaff Anders spun Katniss around in her cloak of pulsing red-hot embers to kiss her. He laughed louder than Haymitch in reminiscence of the incident at Nero's Cafe, though not by much. Seeder Jones glowered at her two friends, mortified but involved. Meanwhile, Katniss' face flushed to match the color of her lipstick.

The victor of the Sixty-Ninth Games won by using District Seven wit, an ax, and a strategy of fake cowardice. To Katniss' dismayed abhorrence and to Peeta's conspicuous delight, her place in the rebellion was acknowledged by undressing.

* * * JOHANNA MASON, VICTOR * * *

She left her dark brown locks

behind in the arena,

slicing them off as she waited for

hovercraft, slouched above

me and a headless girl.

Scrappy and prone to mouthing off, Johanna was readily accepted into the victors. Unlike her fellow Capitol devices, she was not opposed to keep introducing herself to me. I realized that as I accepted her first and last client and consequently carried her two brothers and father away from Seven's Town Square, their blood leaving a trail behind us for her to follow. She did not.

Johanna Mason had a similar reason for hating the Capitol as Haymitch.

In her hazing, she strutted naked down the hall of the Games Headquarters and took a second sip from Chaff's flask. Her exaggerated mask of recklessness offered no Capitol nob much to fantasize. She spited them as much as she blamed herself.

Beetee Ma and Wiress Lemelle of Three did not try to teasingly seduce Haymitch's tributes, but they definitely made them feel uncomfortable. Still, Katniss liked the savants well enough to declare them potential allies to her mentor, who faked disappointment but was actually glad she would be with at least two of the rebel victors responsible for the arena escape.

* * * BEETEE MA, VICTOR * * *

He fidgeted like he was being electrically shocked.

He won because the other children were.

He had a sidekick, or he was the sidekick. They still might be arguing over that.

* * * WIRESS LEMELLE, VICTOR * * *

Her laurel was crooked, as was her posture.

Though she sometimes would not complete her sentences,

the words continued, loud, in her mind.

She was as smart as she looked,

black hair curtaining her face from fame

and eyes dark as the acumen she knew.

Those Capitol devices were there for the rebellion yet others for glory and honor still.

Brutus Pedersen had not volunteered for an old champ in an act of benevolence. No, he was there to win again, not unlike his district partner Enobaria Castro.

Cashmere and Gloss Garnier were siblings who won in consecutive years. Gloss made a point of volunteering when his sister was reaped a second time and her fellow female champions did not even consider swapping destinies with her.

The Hunger Games champion following Johanna's victory was a young lady with a tanned smile and tall hair.

* * * ANNIE CRESTA, VICTOR * * *

Eyes the color of seawater peered up at me

from the murk of a flooded arena

as I collected the twenty-third child,

who was waterlogged and gasping

for what was no longer available.

When a safe and dry Annie Cresta held her ears during interviews afterwards, Haymitch had wondered if she was haunted by phantoms as well. I found out, many years since her anticlimactic Hunger Games finale, that it was the slice of a sword through her district partner's meaty neck she heard - over and over _and over_.

While Annie was not with the others in the Capitol, she almost succeeded in begging for me to take her away. She could have been the fifth victor to adapt to hell on earth after the Quell announcement. What stopped her was the love of her life: Finnick Odair.

Who said only District Twelve could have tragic lovers?

Hunger Games commentators gushed how the arena was morbidly genius that year, which was expected due to the anniversary being celebrated and the calibre of its inhabitants. Twelve sandy spokes circled the island containing the Cornucopia. Surrounding that, a tropical jungle and beach. The sky was a permanent bloody pink.

The arena was a clock, a countdown of horrors. Every hour constantly unleashed mutant creatures or deadly unnatural causes.

In the Third Quarter Quell, the tributes greeted me like an old friend. Rather, an old friend they had fallen out with and burned a bridge or twenty-three between. It was surreal to finally collect those whose lives centered around the notion that they had escaped me.

The first to be eliminated and added to my toll, Seeder Jones sat up from a puddle of herself, brushing some sand off of her shoulders. She had fallen over, right into the pike Gloss gripped. Her eyes glowed warm honey and magnanimity. I took her by the arm. We did not stay for too long; she wanted _out of there_.

Soon after, Marana Shingott was in my dark embrace as well. She had hesitated after seeing Seeder's body, and cried out when an axe suddenly materialized in her chest. Johanna pried it out, then told the dying older woman quietly, "They said you weren't part of the pact. I'm doing you a favor."

As always, the victors' final visions were viewed out of respect. That happened many times throughout the Quell. The differences were the names. The names, they all touched me back.

I'm so tired.

The Capitol nervously awaited their victor of victors as the number of contenders dwindled. With a mere nine left to die, I ventured out of the arena and came upon a soul in a stairwell at the Games Headquarters.

It wore a white Peacekeeper uniform. The source of its demise wore the uniform as well. Yet they were on opposite sides of the rebellion, one implementing, the other in the way.

All the while, across the Control Room hallway, Haymitch nodded at Zane Derks, who nodded back, upwards, indicating the roof.

Zane mouthed two heart-faltering words. " _Almost midnight._ " They were accompanied by a very small, determined smile. He would stay to avoid immediate suspicion, and he would soon be mine.

Alcohol in his veins, old friends dead and alive in his eyes, Haymitch Abernathy climbed the stairway, broadly evading the corpse, to the roof of the Games Headquarters. A hovercraft and a rebellion awaited him.

In the arena, the plan unwound like a roll of twine. As I unscrewed Chaff Anders from his own corpse, Peeta Mellark murdered the man's murderer. What Peeta did not do was understand that Chaff had shielded him from Brutus' saber even though he wasn't the symbol of rebellion.

Brutus and Chaff had one of the most awkward reunions while I carried them away. Chaff broke the dead silence with, "So, uh, no hard feelings?" to which Brutus rolled his eyes and chuckled.

Rightly so, Katniss completed the escape plan. An arrow hit the force field at the twelfth hour, a lightning storm. Attached to the arrow was a metal twine that conducted the electricity from a lightning bolt into the force field dome.

The explosion combusted Panem.

Six tributes escaped me from the Third Quarter Quell. Finnick, Beetee, and Katniss rode in the hovercraft with Haymitch and the rebels. Peeta, Johanna, and Enobaria were collected by Capitol hovercraft.

There were no victors.


	18. The Chessman's Endgame

Unless one is losing tremendously, battles are fought in the middle of a chessboard. Pawns and lesser chessmen maneuver around the grid while sovereigns watch from the far sides. They scheme, they strategize, they determine what to do with their subordinate pieces in order to win.

As the result, I sweep them off the board, unintentionally making room for more.

* * * THE THING ABOUT WAR * * *

During strategized human chaos,

people could sit in a stressful place

and drink a cup of something calming.

In the Capitol, President Snow added sugar cubes into his teacup while his advisers and generals argued over their next move.

Styrofoam cups of coffee that Plutarch Heavensbee practically begged President Alma Coin for were distributed to the officials in District Thirteen. They were calmer than their enemy because they were winning.

District Thirteen was something of a ghost district. The first uprising ended with nuclear weapons aimed at each side of the continent. To end things neatly, the Capitol bribed their nuclear industry district to surrender by guaranteeing their survival and exemption from the solution to their failed insurrection, also known as the Hunger Games.

Despite the prevalent belief that they had been obliterated, the thirteenth district had functioned underground. Because of their enclosed territory, schedules were sacred and certain resources were restricted. Alcohol was prohibited, medical use excepted.

Haymitch Abernathy drank the coffee given to him black and bitter, and he pined for alcohol so badly it burned. He felt mere degrees from frostbite at that stage in his forced sobriety but dead numbness seemed like a luxury after years of constant torture. He looked like a rolled cigarette next to Plutarch Heavensbee, the Head Gamemaker who orchestrated the uprising and had the body shape of a jolly cupcake with a red-faced cherry on top. Haymitch, jaundiced and shaking, would thrum his fingers during the numerous conferences, a whisper of a sound in Plutarch's score.

He shivered with both cold and withdrawal, and I am certain his hellbringers haunted him throughout the war. When hadn't they since that burnt candlewick night in the Victors' Village? Only then Haymitch had something to alleviate them.

Only then District Twelve still existed.

After the Third Quarter Quell's disastrous finale, Twelve was burnt to the ground, fueled by the abundance of coal dust. I was glad Gale Hawthorne saved as many as he could from me, evacuating them into the woods beyond the fence, but his effort was not enough. Thousands of humans were collected that day, young or old, Town-capped or Seam-blotched, sitting or standing or running or whimpering or even waiting.

As he ignored the ringing and riming as best he could, Haymitch continued to add kindling to the rebellion. Katniss thrived onscreen, a young, powerful queen piece leading the rebels to victory. Offscreen, a used pawn often cried and napped while Haymitch barely slept much at all - but then, when hadn't he?

Peeta, along with his fellow captured victors and other rebellion members, never saw daylight in the Capitol prison chambers. They thought about that whenever they could, which was not when guards or doctors were interrogating, torturing, or killing them. Sleep was not desired in those squalid cells because the captives simply could not endure whatever dreams were brought with it.

I was so accustomed to leaving that prison with a mutilated soul - Avoxes and insurgents, mostly, as they were expendable. The victors were just kept breathing. It sickened me but there was nothing I could do.

An armed group from Thirteen, led by Commander Robert Boggs, with Gale Hawthorne very close behind, rescued them.

* * * SOME OUTCOMES * * *

Enobaria Castro was left behind because

she was just a few cells further down from the others.

Johanna Mason squinted up at the fluorescent lights

and groggily dreamt of sunlight while

doctors repaired everything but her mind.

Annie Cresta ran into the arms of Finnick Odair,

their only words the hushed sounds of

sniffling, hair rustling, and lips brushing on skin.

Peeta Mellark greeted Katniss Everdeen and their mentor

by strangling the girl.

Dumbstruck, Haymitch Abernathy could only watch

as Commander Boggs butted the boy with his rifle.

Katniss swept by them on a gurney, a plastic brace encasing her neck, and Haymitch frowned at the hospital doors for more than a few seconds after they finally swiveled shut.

"So the boy's deranged," said Haymitch _._ A doctor grimaced as she contemplated how to restate the diagnosis, deciding to first ask if they knew of the effects of mutant wasps' stings. Together, Haymitch and Plutarch shrugged _sort of, but not really._ How interesting that the man who ordered nests to be planted in arenas was unaware what their inhabitants were capable of.

"The venom attacks the part of the brain that houses fear, causing macabre hallucinations. It's used for some kind of torture method," she explained, complete with hand motions. "We found traces of venom in his system. I am willing to bet they injected it into him and then distorted his memories by showing footage of him and Soldier Everdeen."

"So now he's seeing Katniss as dangerous?" Plutarch asked.

The doctor nodded. "That's all we really know at this point. Hijacking is rarely practiced, or that is what can be assumed from the Capitol's lack of information on it."

"Well, time to explain all this to the girl, even though it's not much," Haymitch sighed. "Then, there's rehabilitating on Peeta's part." Both his returned tributes laid, possibly restrained, in hospital beds, not dead but very much in pain.

Although she had the excuse of recovery, Katniss lunged for work. She helped the rebel cause alongside Haymitch while he simultaneously ensured Peeta's recovery.

A mountain fortress in District Two was the barrier that kept rebel forces from the Capitol - the only way to the controlling city was to break through it. They bombed the fortress and invaded the Capitol, at Katniss and a thousand others' expense.

Like most wars, there were casualties of the soldier and civilian varieties present in the second revolution.

The mountain had coughed out Peacekeepers like miners, blackened and burnt. I simply held out my palms and they limped onto them.

Katniss rallied the living while I rallied the dead. Through an eyepiece, Haymitch whispered what to say. In his ear, the phantom of his father, a collier who fell victim to a silent canary, whispered threats and accusations. He shook it away and directed the figurehead to symbolize revolution.

At the closing of her speech, Katniss was promptly shot. _All his fault, all his fault, all his fault!_ Haymitch shouted, "No! Katniss! KATNISS!" into the transmitter and his receiver was unresponsive. Terrified Seam eyes flashed between the unconscious girl on one screen and the rioting soldiers on another.

Gunshots no longer clipping the air, Lyme Natterson waited as I made my way across the battlefield of bodies. When I extracted her soul, I saw that her memories were less than eminent. I embraced Lyme and the other souls very tightly that night.

Fortified by padding in her uniform, Katniss escaped me. But so many others did not have special uniforms protecting their vital organs. So many of them were not armed at all. Alas, many were not even old enough to be armed or wear fatigues.

With all of the remaining chess pieces were on one half of the board, the rebels invaded the Capitol.

Before it fell, I was chasing Katniss, Peeta, Finnick, Gale, and a reporter throughout the controlling city. Robert Boggs commented in a definitive tone that I am as much of a sleuth as I am a scythe-bearer. His legs were blown off and his soul was tender under the ragged sky.

Finnick, I had soon enough. His brilliant eyes and lilting brogue expressed that _h_ _e didn't want to leave, but he would._ He was twenty-five, in love with Annie Odair, unknowingly already a father, and no longer alive.

Gale wrenched his hand out of mine despite two bullets lodged in his body, courtesy of a squadron of half-confounded Peacekeepers. Rohan could never have done that. Maybe mirror images generations apart were not alike as well. The sky in the news coverage Gale watched later at the rebel base was tinted like blueprint designs, sapphire with thin white wisps.

The clouds had darkened, expanding, while Katniss and Peeta reached the Presidential Mansion, where concerned parents herded their children to be chaperoned and, unknowingly, reaped.

From a safe distance, the reporter witnessed, and would later recount, a Capitol hovercraft dropping them over the families: parachutes, exactly the ones that delivered sponsor-funded supplies to tributes in the arenas.

They fell with the snow, they exploded with the humans.

Yes, I had seen them before - on the reverse spectrum of humanity.

I carried a girl, no more than seven years old, through the German city of Berlin while handkerchief parachutes floated down. Those parachutes did not explode; candy bars were attached to them, not incendiaries. Beneath a thick gray curtain sky, she blinked, forgot to open them, and exhaled a final time. Around her, children reached up with greedy, hungry fists.

That young German girl died so many years before the parachute bombings in Panem's Capitol. She had never tasted chocolate in her life.

Primrose Everdeen died so many years after the candy bombings in Berlin, Germany. She was sent from Thirteen to aid rebel soldiers and, unexpectedly for a time, Capitol children. All of them bled and pled. She was not yet fourteen.

Glowing in the crisp white medic uniform, Primrose tried to stay and help the wounded after I collected her soul. In particular, her sister Katniss, who was literally a girl on fire.

Once again, scars that showed both the mental and physical damage: quilting Katniss' body were burns either left as melted flesh or replaced with skin grafts.

Haymitch sat in a chair outside each of her operations.

When he was permitted to enter the Presidential Mansion, he did not drink his pain away, not yet. He had to be strong for his victors.

All three champions of District Twelve lost their words in the explosions. The ashes of children, including her little sister, choked Katniss, blocking words she could not bring herself to utter, anyway. Peeta already had trouble discerning reality from hallucinations, let alone whether he had seen people combust around him. Haymitch could not hear his own thoughts over the din of his phantoms and _that damn telephone_ so the words settled at the bottom of his being, broken and unheard, frosting against the psychosomatic ice.

Yet, though they were too unconscious and too bedridden to reply, Haymitch only spoke to his kids who were on fire as everything fell to pieces - rather, ashes.

* * * THE FROSTBIT HEART OF A FALLEN CHESSMAN * * *

A matching black and blue like mine,

he dared it to stop beating against his ribcage.

Of course he soon found himself in the same garden as Coriolanus Snow. After all, he was calamity's bridegroom, wedded by fate.

Caressing a white rose that ordinarily would have been in his lapel, the incarcerated ex-president of Panem smiled at Haymitch. His hair, while still combed the same, had grayed since their last encounter I witnessed, and his skin was the sickly color of dying.

"Hello, Mister Abernathy," Coriolanus said. "If I may be so frank with you, I am very, very tired right now. I have already met with several people whose only intentions were to humiliate me, accuse me, or demand things from me. You're not here for that, are you?"

Haymitch had no words but so much to say to that man. He just stared, his expression nearly timorous.

The older man tilted his head knowingly. "I heard our Miss Everdeen is quiet now, no doubt brought on by her sister's _untimely_ death." He feigned remorse. "But, tell me, how have _you_ been?" No one had asked him that in a while. Haymitch swallowed, probably contemplating escape, when the president continued, "You look pitiful, if that's anything to go by. I assume Thirteen did not take to your needs?"

The man nodded, like a child, like a good little victor. He will invite himself into the president's spectacular wine cellar minutes after their conversation.

"Well, I suppose that's one way I'm - pardon me, I _was_ a better president than Alma Coin, hm?"

The words tripped out of his mouth, traipsing towards his first recipient in days. "You're not a president, you're a king." Coriolanus raised his brows, delightfully puzzled. "Like a king in chess, not a real one with monarchies or whatever. Technically, you're a tyrant. It's always been a chess game between you and me. I manipulated the arena to my advantage, you murdered my family. I stepped out of place, you took away Stephan and isolated me from everyone else. Throughout the war, a chess game in itself, we were still playing."

"You consider yourself a king, don't you."

Haymitch's brows rose then. "I wasn't under any impression that I was leading the war. But in our little personal game, I was."

"Past tense?"

"You're in shackles." A victorious smirk followed that.

The old man chuckled. "Yes, but I will die soon. You, on the other hand, have our new esteemed president to play with."

"Let me guess," Haymitch drawled, reclining on a bench, "you think you still have a chance at winning if Panem ends up as screwed as it was under you."

"No," denied Coriolanus, thoughtfully. "But while I'm defeated in our supposed game, the bigger one - the current insurrection, as you said - is still in its endgame. The Capitol has lost but the districts still do not have the agency they wanted. Mister Abernathy, do you trust Thirteen? Their president assigns herself in charge and no one has complained because they are so _desperate_ for stability."

Eyes rolling, "Don't flatter yourself, Lanus. Panem was not stable in the least beforehand. Coin won't solve problems using children and denying communication in the districts, and I'd say that's a great start."

"You honestly believe a president from the very district who weaseled out of what you rebelled against will set the best precedent?"

Frustrated, Haymitch growled, "Look, we're reconstructing the government. I don't trust it completely, I'm not gullible. But Panem is already starting to change for the-"

"People don't _change,_ " spat Coriolanus, and I was inclined to agree, but he stopped himself from furthering the argument and, after a tense moment, addressed his new sobriquet. "I'm Cor, not Lanus, to anyone who can casually address me."

"So... no one calls you that." He never would, anyway. Somewhere amidst the rosebushes, a young, dark-haired ghost might have stuck out his tongue.

"Charming as ever, I see." The murderer of Haymitch's first and second lives coughed, a deep, hacking sound that rattled more than his throat. Emerald and silver eyes shined on the handkerchief as it pulled away from his face, revealing crimson stains. "See? I'm dying. But you're not done yet, my boy."

When Coriolanus Snow finally met me, it was live on television. He was supposed to be assassinated by Katniss Everdeen but instead choked on his bloody laughter.

His cackling ceased as I stood before him.

Standing amongst Capitol devices, Haymitch had sneezed when the girl released a single arrow and looked up to the chaos after second-long silence. The crowd was more confused than he was, though; he could read the girl like a clock.

Stunned like the nation, President Alma Coin pulled the arrow out by herself. I lifted her off the balcony tiles. She was a rather gray lady.

No one except the Hunger Games champions knew why Katniss had killed her. In their final visions was an election during the beginning of the war's end.

Alma had proposed a final Hunger Games where Capitol children would be reaped to the surviving Capitol devices.

* * * THE POLL * * *

Peeta Mellark, no.

Beetee Ma, no.

Annie Odair, no.

Johanna Mason, yes.

Enobaria Castro, yes.

Katniss Everdeen, yes.

Haymitch Abernathy, somewhat yes.

The final two, they were interesting. Without them I would have been disappointed but not astonished by the human race repeating past crimes, the very ones they fought against like the _hypocrites_ they were.

Katniss Everdeen and Haymitch Abernathy distinguished the word in the political mess, as did those who vetoed the proposal.

Yet Katniss had voted for her sister, and Haymitch followed her. They believed Alma Coin needed some ignorant bliss. What she did not understand was that there had already been a reaping of Capitol children, and the arena had been a battlefield within a city, and the tributes were eliminated when they were engulfed in flames.

A young woman from Eight was elected president the week following the assassination.

During late winter, in the trial of Katniss Everdeen, one of the first under Panem's new government, Katniss was found innocent as she was apparently mentally ill. Given a bow, she was lethal. They exiled her to Twelve where there was barely anything to shoot.

Slightly intoxicated, Haymitch Abernathy volunteered to be her guardian and was granted as such since the war was too taxing for anyone to pay much attention to his hollow face, raccoon eyes, hair made of frantic scribbles, and posture that lacked in balance and linearity. The court even suggested Peeta Mellark as well since the teenage convalescent had been progressively recovering in the psych ward, predicted to be deemed an outpatient by spring.

It was a decision made under the influence Haymitch did not regret.

Effie Trinket met him in the hallway. She was stripped of her principles, no doubt, but her nail polish had not chipped. She handed him some papers and a shrug of the lips he reciprocated without hesitation.

Haymitch boarded the hovercraft with Katniss and the promise of Peeta's arrival.

He walked Katniss to her living room and then wandered back to his own house, boots crunching in snow. He noticed the lights were on at Stephan Hendrick's house when he reached his porch, and blanched. A window opened and Sae called out, "You bring them home?"

"Yeah," he hollered back, unlocking the door. "You aware there are about a dozen other places you could have picked?"

The elderly woman paused, not certain how that was meant to be taken. Deciding, she answered, "Didn't think he'd mind. Someone has to keep an eye on all of you. Besides, the other houses are full."

Haymitch muttered, "What?" as he turned and scanned the Victors' Village, taking in the light inside each of the houses. "Oh." The mansions were spared by the fire, but in the distance he saw no Town and no Seam, only a wasteland of charred remains and the dark fringe of wilderness and a lonely black sky above it all.

How much humanity had the sky witnessed? It was eternal, its colors varying.

To distance himself from it, Haymitch trudged down his basement steps, each _creak_ stirring up dust. He excavated a cardboard box, one of many. He must have packed haunting keepsakes away to forget _them_ or protect them from the mess that had collected over the decades.

Wearing the faded miner jacket to him warm in all senses, its sleeves still loose while the shoulders fit fairly well, Haymitch returned picture frames to their places. The dead whispered in their paper windows as they slid across wooden tables, mantels, and bureaus, but some things just do not change.

They would have new neighbors before he died.

He'd go to his death without calling it so, but when Haymitch Abernathy sat down with a drink in District Twelve - where its people had known him, loved him, celebrated, pitied, abandoned, and ostracized him - despite and because of everything that had happened there, it could have been _home._


	19. Epilogue

Once the game ended, I suppose things got better for the human race. My job and their behavior were not finished, and they never will be, but twenty-three young faces no longer lit the sky every year for nationwide entertainment.

Out of the seven surviving victors, I culled two before Haymitch.

Enobaria Castro was attacked, killed, and left in an alleyway somewhere in District Five. The culprits were said to be manic gloaters from the rebellion. When I carried her away, we followed the wind. It whipped our hair in our faces. She got a mouthful as she laughed.

Beetee Ma died several days after an assassination attempt by some sore losers. He sighed, cleaned his glasses' lenses on his shirt, pushed them back up his nose, and stepped out of his body himself. For the most part, he welcomed me and I welcomed him, considering the circumstances.

Humans were still humans after revolutions, as much as I hate to summarize their demises in such a dismissive way. Humans will be humans. That was how things were since as long as I can remember.

I had collected a drunkard on the same day Haymitch died. She was riddled with lice and disease, her skin tattered yellow parchment. Earlier, a freckled toddler who strayed too far from the backyard.

The former soul shook, the latter mewled.

I found Haymitch Abernathy doing both, except he was no longer a drunkard nor an infant.

There were a lot of labels for the cause of his death, but make no mistake about it, it was a death by memories. It had not been peaceful.

I arrived to collect him but the old man still lived. Withdrawal from alcohol for an unspecified reason and amount of time had wilted him.

Peeta Mellark sat nearby in the bedroom and clasped his creased hand. Sympathetic and hopeless, he watched as the Second Quarter Quell victor and significant rebellion member writhed, crying upsettingly loud.

Downstairs, a blanched, tearless Katniss Mellark sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the whistle of the kettle as well as the end of her dear friend and guardian. In another house, her and Peeta's children pretended to sleep, too young to witness the deterioration of a relic from a time they did not understand yet.

Intense shivers racked Haymitch's old body, tearing the sutures of old and older scars. The sharp, cold stitch across his middle had frozen over the entire body. He protested the pain in grunts, delirious bellows, and convulsive gasps, and begged Peeta, or anyone, maybe unseen others, to _help him, please, just help him._

The damn nightmares as well as the rimy guilt were smothering him, no matter how many blankets were piled atop him. He suffocated.

Then, all of a sudden, the repaired telephone downstairs in the study rang out, and its incessant chime became a knell.

The fallen chessman arose.

He had been sitting up, arms crossed impatiently, when I crossed the room to reach him. His Seam eyes shone silver, lit with life that he never lost despite his hardships.

I cannot describe the look Haymitch Abernathy gave me.

Holding him, we watched his memories: that long queue of stored up skies and what happened under them.

* * * A COMMENT * * *

If a human's life flashes before them

and they die bored,

that is, in its own way, significant.

Like the other victors, he would draw in a rattling breath or mutter something in remembrance.

Sometimes a memory was familiar to me as well.

Meanwhile, a younger man lost hold of his mettle. It fell to the carpet with his knees. The bed lurched a little when Peeta fell against its side. He cupped his own face and exhaled once, twice, then sobbed without shame.

Everything he or anyone else had ever done was ignored - at that instant, he was another human mourning a friend, the elderly corpse buried under quilts in the bed. Both mere men who knew each other, one alive, one not alive.

It was that thought that somehow led him downstairs, not to his wife, who quietly ordered her daughter on the other line to go back to bed, but into the dimly lit study.

Seated in the desk chair, an empty sheet of paper laid in front of him and a pen trembled in his hand. Peeta glared at the pen as he set it down. Inky almost-words rejected him, permeating the pen tip yet failing to _scratch_ against the parchment.

Holding his head, flaxen hair hanging limp at his temples, "You bastard." Who was he addressing: himself or the soul with me upstairs? "You stupid, grumpy, arrogant, cynical bastard." Oh, never mind.

Katniss must have heard her husband because she hovered outside the door. She heard the man mutter to himself, "How's the world going to remember you? They don't... they don't _know_ like I do."

"He doesn't care about the world, so long as we remember ourselves."

Peeta faced Katniss, and she smiled through her tears, both of them hurting in a raw, honest way. Already, they were beginning to heal.

When we left the Victors' Village, Haymitch finally said, "You aren't as scary as I thought you'd be."

"I'm not the reason for pain and suffering before a person expires," I replied wearily. "I am simply what takes them afterward."

"Well, I never thought actually dying would be agonizing, as much as I dreaded it before-"

"Or desired it," I pointed out.

He frowned. "Yeah, I guess there were times I wanted to die. But..."

I had to look at him. "You didn't want me when you finally did."

Nodding, Haymitch admitted, "It kind of crept up on me. Is that how it is for everyone else?"

"Most of them accept it by the very last millisecond, but almost all of them are surprised, even those who expect me or even ask for me."

He was very quiet for a moment. Overhead was a canvas, blank white yet grainy in texture, filled with possibilities and big cloud tubes of paint. "The - all the tributes, how were they?"

"Young and afraid. I always tried to comfort them."

Haymitch shuddered but he was no longer tortured by the psychosomatic ice. "Cory, my younger brother?"

"He was cold as sorbet, Haymitch," I answered, starting to smile, "and when I told him that he asked what it was and if he could have some." My cold plastic heart melted once again, that time at his laughter.

* * * A DIFFERENT TYPE OF QUESTION * * *

The hellbringers, their names once

harshly cursed in between drams,

trickled out of him like melted snow.

"I met all of them, yes." He waited. "They accepted me with grace and they forgave you."

It's possible for the dead to cry for the dead.

Haymitch Abernathy cried, relieved, so relieved - _finally relieved_ \- and my hand hugged his shoulder. "You might see them again soon."

"Will I?" He sounded so childishly doubtful, the old soul.

"I am not certain, but here is where I must leave you."

Noticing his surroundings, Haymitch asked, "Wait! I need to know. You heard them, too. Did you understand?"

An hour after my answer, as I collected my thoughts along with eclipsing humans and colors, I found myself in his study.

A thought struck me: no one had ever read in that room. I could destroy the unread books since no one needed the old Capitol philosophies - bookcases already cracking and splintering in my mind - but the memory of the book thief kept that only a musing. I glared at the titles of the published works of organized human cruelty until the solution slipped into my possession.

Before it did, I had screamed obscenities at myself, Haymitch, the rest of his species known by all as humans, by me as callous, mortal bastards, even Peeta Mellark for not finishing what he had thought of starting.

Well, if I wanted something done right.

Instead of resorting to one human-like behavior, I chose the other. I made something beautiful out of something wretched.

I sat at the desk like Peeta Mellark, yet unlike him I took a single book from the shelf. Contemplating what I said to Haymitch, I turned the clean yet yellowed pages of an unread book and tore them out. I didn't read a word. I had my own to write.

I had heard the callers from the coffin through their recipient himself. But they were as haunting as they were unreal.

They tormented Haymitch like humans torment me: at intervals, which was worse than relentless misery.

Of course, I cannot tear humans out of the wall. Not unless they are dead, that is.

I picked up the pen. The study expanded. Behind me, the bookcase and the telephone looked over my shoulder at a blank page, the first of many.

_Where to start?_

I looked around and decided.

Wiping off the title, I replaced it with an event that resulted from some of the most unfortunate human experiences.

Refilling the spine with paper from the desk, I imagined Peeta Mellark's handwriting scrawled across the sheet instead of mine, using different words to tell the same story, just from a different perspective.

Maybe I am more of a philosopher than I am a slueth or scythe-bearer, because that could very well be the definition of _life._

My answer to Haymitch Abernathy was a summary of my own perspective. I said it to the recipient of the callers from the coffin, I wrote it last in his story that I carry with six others, and I say it to you now.

* * * A LAST NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR * * *

I witness everything about humans,

the best and the worst and whatever is in between,

like the sky.


End file.
